Founding Engineer

Fernstone • New York, NY

3d • $120,000 - $180,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Fernstone is building a new kind of insurance company, combining AI with expert advisors to place insurance faster and at better terms. They believe AI will fundamentally reshape how insurance is bought and sold. The company has raised $3M from Y Combinator and other notable investors and has grown from 0 to 500+ customers since launching at the start of the year. Fernstone was founded by James (BCG, Traba, UChicago) and Bryant (Google, SentiLink, Vanderbilt). The role of Founding Engineer is the second engineering hire and will have a substantial role in building the product, working directly with operators, owning critical systems across the stack, and helping set the technical direction of the company. The work will have a direct impact on how the company operates, serves customers, and grows.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience shipping and maintaining production software that people depend on.
• Ability to take an ambiguous business problem, ask good questions, and turn it into a focused solution.
• Strong backend and relational database fundamentals.
• Comfortable building a polished frontend.
• Experience thinking carefully about data correctness, failure handling, and how systems behave after deployment.
• Practical experience building with language models, including evaluating their output and handling mistakes.
• Proficiency in using AI development tools effectively and taking responsibility for understanding, reviewing, and debugging shipped code.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the operations team to understand how insurance work gets done, identify opportunities, and decide what to build.
• Design and build complete features across the interface, application logic, data model, and infrastructure.
• Create reliable workflows where accuracy matters, outside systems fail, and events may unfold over days or weeks.
• Build systems that interpret information, automate multi-step work, and recognize when a person needs to step in.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed