Engineer in Residence (Early Stage 0-1 Startups)

About the role

Become an Engineer-in-Residence at Philo Ventures! Build a great product with one of our founding teams, and spin out as a founding engineer at the company you want to bet on.

What You’ll Do

• Strategic Thought Partnership. Work alongside your co-founder to navigate product-market fit, making critical pivots and product decisions based on conversations with potential customers.
• Be very hands-on, with things like producing code, vetting out ideas, white boarding, holding healthy debates, moving from prototype to production-grade software at high velocity, ensuring security and building to learn what provides value to your target customers.
• Architect for the Future. Help build the engineering culture, use modern tools and tech to move fast, leveraging AI-assisted dev tools, and be in charge of evolving the system to meet business needs.
• Work hard. Thrive within the inherent "beautiful mess" of a pre-Series A startup, maintaining a high-conviction, low-attachment mindset that allows you to embrace ambiguity and navigate technical setbacks with the resilience needed to turn hard problems into a category-defining company.
• Build a solid relationship with your founding team, rooted in radical candor and mutual reliance; play to each other’s strengths to navigate the highs and lows of the startup journey, ensuring that when the venture succeeds, you win together as a united front
• Be supported by Philo Ventures' internal team, to accelerate your success with your founding team.

What We’re Looking For

• Founder mentality: ownership, resourcefulness, and the ability to thrive in ambiguity.
• Product-first engineering mindset: focus on delivering customer value over technical complexity.
• Full-stack: strong experience in frontend & backend development. Many of our startups are built on a NextJS (React / Typescript) foundation, but there may be flexibility to build with other stacks depending on the needs of the startup.
• Startup experience: prior work at an early-stage company or high-growth tech startup is a huge plus.
• A "0 to 1" Specialist: You thrive in the "blank canvas" stage. You are energized by greenfield builds, rapid prototyping, and the chaos of the first customer feedback loop.
• Bias for action: you move fast, make pragmatic trade-offs, and iterate efficiently. You don't wait for a roadmap; you help draw it. You make pragmatic trade-offs, ship daily, and iterate based on data rather than assumptions.
• AI-Native Developer: You’ve moved beyond manual coding. You leverage tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or other agentic tools to generate code and to amplify your output, and you’re excited about integrating LLMs into core product features.
• Seasoned Technical Leader: You have the "scar tissue" from early-stage startups or high-growth environments. You have confidence with things like SQL, API design, healthy engineering practices, and system performance, with the communication skills to express technical tradeoffs to less technical people.

Signals We Value

• You have opinions on how to build a healthy working environment.
• You spend your weekends tinkering, building new things, testing new technologies; code isn’t a 9-5 burden for you it something you genuinely enjoy.
• You’ve previously co-founded or seriously attempted to co-found a company, or was a very early engineering hire.
• You have strong, well-reasoned views on developer experience, technology choices, and product-market fit—but you’re humble enough to evolve your opinions as you expand your knowledge.
• You’re energized by 0→ 1 work: greenfield builds, rapid prototyping, first-customer feedback loops.
• You’re based in or willing to relocate to the Utah / Silicon Slopes area.

What We Offer

• Reduced risk and more focus on the core of your product. Philo Studio takes care of the mundane, supporting your team with things like an initial investment seed, legal, payroll, design, marketing, software engineering assistance and more, so that you and your founding team can focus more of your time on building a successful product.
• A collaborative, mission-driven environment – working alongside world-class founders and a well-established venture studio.
• Founding equity with the startup you choose to jump on.
• Health insurance