Founding Engineer

Kilo•Capon Bridge, WV

1d•€4,000 - €6,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Breakneck Studio is an incubator and accelerator that scales digital and e-commerce brands at high velocity. It is home to their Co-Found program, where ambitious founders take products from zero to market in months, not years. This is an opportunity to gain hands-on, zero-to-scale experience not found in a regular job. We are a fast-scaling travel startup with strong product-market fit ($1.46M ARR and growing) building Marlow AI — an AI-assisted trip planning experience that hands off to a real human advisor to lock in the details and book the trip accurately. Marlow AI is a two-sided platform: travelers get a consumer product that plans and books real trips, and advisors get a SaaS-style subscription with certification and qualified leads baked into the offer. We are looking for a Founding Engineer who can own features end-to-end, from database schema through the server function layer, the UI, and the tracking that indicates success, and ship them independently. This is one of the first technical hires on the team, and the individual's contributions will significantly influence the architecture, integrations, and decisions that shape the company's scaling strategy.

Requirements

3–7 years shipping production web apps, including at least one seed / Series A or B startup as an early hire (employee #2–15)
Be comfortable being the only engineer on a feature, from DB migration to UI/UX, with no one else to lean on
Personally shipped something using Supabase, Postgres RLS, or pgvector — and understand why RLS-plus-GRANT is non-negotiable, not optional hardening
TypeScript-native: you write it and read it without flinching, not "I've used TS before"
Hands-on experience with at least one meta-framework (Next.js, Remix, TanStack Start, SvelteKit) and understand SSR vs. client boundaries
Integrated at least 10 third-party APIs, including auth, webhooks, and signature verification — payment processors, comms platforms, legacy SOAP vendors, or similar
Strong communication skills and be comfortable working directly with founders and cross-functional stakeholders

Nice To Haves

LLM tool-calling experience: function calling, streaming, prompt versioning
Experience on edge/Workers runtimes
SQL beyond CRUD: window functions, CTEs, triggers
Exposure to supervised fine-tuning for AI

Responsibilities

Own features end-to-end: schema design → server function → UI/UX → event tracking → ship to production, using our stack of React 19, TanStack Start, Supabase (Postgres + RLS), and Cloudflare Workers
Work directly in the Marlow AI trip-planning flow and the advisor handoff/booking flow, across both the traveler-facing and advisor-facing surfaces
Design and evolve Postgres schemas with Supabase, including RLS policies and GRANTs that actually hold up under real traffic
Integrate and maintain third-party APIs — flights (Kiwi Tequila), hotels (Hotelston SOAP), payments (Primer, PayPal Marketplace), subscriptions/leads (Kilo Launchpad) — including auth, webhooks, and signature verification
Build and refine LLM-powered tooling inside Marlow's orchestration layer (tool-calling, streaming, prompt iteration) across OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter
Instrument features against our unified event schema (view_item, add_to_cart, initiate_checkout, add_payment_info, payment_complete) so product and growth decisions are backed by real data
Ship on Cloudflare's edge runtime and reason clearly about SSR vs. client boundaries in TanStack Start
Write tests where they earn their keep, and work alongside AI-agent dogfooding
Take ownership of ambiguous problems, make a call, and move — this is a one-engineer-per-feature environment, not a hand-off pipeline
Help shape technical direction as we grow — you won't be handed a spec and a backlog forever; as the team grows, expect a voice in architecture calls and, over time, a hand in shaping the engineering team itself