Founding Engineer

Whym is hiring a Founding Engineer to build its product across backend services, data systems, infrastructure, and mobile and web apps. The role also contributes to product decisions, prototypes, user research, and customer support at an early-stage startup.

Responsibilities:

• Backend services and APIs. Design and ship the services Whym runs on. Data modeling, async work, performance, reliability. You own how the client and server fit together
• Data and pipelines. Build the plumbing that moves activity data, user signals, and analytics through the system. Partner with Lynn, our Head of Search and Discovery, on the data layer that feeds ranking and eval
• Mobile and web. Contribute to the apps users hold in their hands. Architecture, performance, and feature work across mobile and web. You do not need to lead this surface, but you do need to be able to ship on it
• Infra and developer experience. Touch CI, observability, and deploy when it unblocks the team. Raise the floor on how fast we can ship without breaking things
• Prototypes and research. Build throwaway prototypes to answer product questions. Sit in on user research and let what you hear change what you build
• Product and design calls. Make product and technical decisions independently when needed. You have good product sense

Requirements:

• We expect most of your past work to be backend, and we expect you to be excited about reaching into the client when the product demands it
• We are looking for a strong generalist who has built serious backend systems and is comfortable getting their hands on the apps too
• You should find that appealing, not beneath you
• You do not need to lead this surface, but you do need to be able to ship on it
• Make product and technical decisions independently when needed. You have good product sense
• 8+ years in engineering, with substantial full-stack work shipped to production
• Strong backend foundations. You can design a service, model the data, reason about async behavior, and debug a performance regression. You do not need a platform team to get work done
• You have shipped frontend or mobile code in production and can hold your own on a React, React Native, or native iOS/Android codebase. You do not need to be a specialist here, but you do need to be willing and capable
• Strong product instinct. You connect what you build to what users feel. You know which detail matters and can say why in plain language
• AI-native. You use modern AI tools in your daily work and have opinions about which ones earn their keep. You know what AI slop looks like and you do not turn it in as final work
• Clear writer and communicator. You document decisions. You disagree without posturing
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You thrive at early stage, and drive forward towards good outcomes
• High agency. You notice what needs doing and do it without waiting to be asked
• If you have spent time as a frontend or mobile engineer somewhere along the way, that's a real plus
• Time spent as a frontend or mobile engineer, with shipped consumer-facing work you can point to
• Experience with search, feed, recommender, or ranking systems, and comfort working next to our Head of Search and Discovery's domain
• Offline-first, real-time, or location-based product experience
• Voice, multimodal, or agent-driven interface work
• Design, motion, or interaction-design sensibility that goes beyond engineering
• Infra and developer-experience instincts — CI, observability, deploy pipelines you have actually owned
• Experience at an early-stage startup where you wore many hats
• Systems thinker. You build processes that scale. You document what you build