Founding Systems Software Engineer

Substrate•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP. We're hiring a systems software engineer who has tackled hard technical problems to help us build core 0→1 systems at the intersection of software, hardware, and finance. You'll help architect and ship systems that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more. Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options: You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry. You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization. You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

Requirements

You've solved hard technical problems most of your peers haven't encountered — and you can explain exactly how your solution works to extreme depth
You gravitate toward thinking in systems, infrastructure, and architectural tradeoffs
You have strong opinions about what good abstractions look like
You have deep experience with Node.js, TypeScript, Postgres, and AWS
You prefer hard backend problems, but are comfortable building frontends and have UI design taste
You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Responsibilities

Wrap beautiful and simple abstractions around gnarly complexity, lots of data, and legacy systems
Own full product lifecycle —from customer pain → full-stack design → 0-to-1 full-stack engineering → ship product
Design and deploy production-grade LLM systems that automate core loan operations (e.g., underwriting, compliance, document processing)
Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession