Founding Platform Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, NY

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're representing an early-stage fintech startup building AI-native infrastructure for commercial insurance. Rather than simply digitizing existing workflows, the company is rebuilding the commercial insurance operating system from the ground up using AI to automate underwriting, pricing, and policy management. Founded by experienced operators from leading fintech and insurance companies, the team is tackling one of the largest underserved markets in financial services. As a Founding Platform Engineer, you'll play a foundational role in designing the internal systems, workflows, and infrastructure that power every product the company builds. This is a highly cross-functional position with broad ownership and direct collaboration with the founders.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Strong backend or platform engineering experience building production systems.
Experience with distributed systems, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and developer platforms.
Comfortable building internal tools, workflows, and infrastructure that enable product teams to move quickly.
Strong systems thinking with the ability to balance long-term architecture and rapid execution.
Experience working closely with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business needs into technical solutions.
Comfortable prototyping architecture and functionality before scaling production systems.
Strong ownership mentality with the ability to operate independently in an early-stage startup environment.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate directly with executive leadership.
Candidates must already have U.S. work authorization.

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI infrastructure, machine learning platforms, or model deployment systems.
Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flagging, or product analytics platforms.
Experience designing observability, monitoring, and logging systems.
Startup experience as an early engineering hire with broad technical ownership.
Interest in fintech, insurance technology, or enterprise workflow automation.
Experience building internal developer platforms and productivity tooling.
Passion for solving ambiguous problems and creating scalable technical foundations.
Comfortable wearing multiple hats across infrastructure, backend engineering, and platform development.

Responsibilities

Design and build the company's internal platform and core infrastructure from the ground up.
Build AI-powered model deployment and serving infrastructure for underwriting and pricing systems.
Develop product experimentation and A/B testing frameworks to accelerate feature development.
Build internal tooling that improves engineering productivity and operational efficiency.
Create robust observability, monitoring, and logging infrastructure across platform services.
Build APIs, event-driven systems, and shared platform capabilities used across engineering teams.
Work directly with the CEO, CTO, and Chief Underwriting Officer to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Contribute across infrastructure, backend systems, and internal developer tooling as company priorities evolve.
Establish engineering standards and platform architecture that will support long-term company growth.
Help shape the engineering culture as one of the company's earliest technical hires.