Founding Engineer

About the role

This is a full-time, on-site role in New York City for someone who can build product and drive outcomes with customers.

This is not a role for someone who wants clean abstractions, perfect APIs, or slow roadmaps. You will ship production fixes, deploy automations, talk to operators, and help close deals — often in the same week.

What you’ll do:

- Own integrations with lenders, vendors, and state-specific processes (often inconsistent and hostile to automation)

- Debug and harden systems that deal with messy inputs: OCR outputs, missing data, DMV rejection loops, inconsistent county requirements

- Work directly with customers: gather requirements, explain workflows, manage pilots, and turn adoption into expansion

- Support live operations when needed

- Help design the product by being close to the pain: rejections, backlog, chase cycles, etc.

You will be expected to:

- Write code that directly impacts revenue and customer retention

- Communicate confidently with collateral teams, ops teams, and decision-makers

- Be a “founder energy” operator: see problems, fix problems, close problems

You are a strong fit if you have:

- Strong computer science fundamentals and engineering judgment

- Real backend experience (TypeScript / Node preferred; AWS + cloud workflows a plus)

- High ownership

- Ability to communicate clearly with customers and translate pain into product

- Entrepreneurial temperament: you like chaotic problems and moving fast

Bonus (but not required):

- Experience in fintech, lending, B2B SaaS, or compliance-heavy workflows

- Sales instinct: you can tell what a customer actually needs vs. what they’re asking for

- Experience working with large enterprise clients (pilots, rollouts, expansions)

See the posting on Cardinal Gray's site