Founding Engineer

About the Role

Idea Fund of La Crosse is a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in high-potential startups in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, with $43mm under management across two funds. Beyond backing companies founded by others, Idea Fund co-founds businesses directly: it develops the concept, sponsors formation, provides the first capital, and recruits the founding team. We are recruiting an engineer who wants to co-found a new company. This is a builder’s seat: the founding engineer writes the first code, ships the first product, and turns a validated concept into a real business.

Rather than hiring into a single predetermined concept, this search is for a founding engineer we will pair with one of the ventures currently in development at Idea Fund.

The Concepts

Idea Fund maintains a pipeline of ventures in active development, each led or co-led by an experienced operator. The founding engineer will be matched to the concept where timing, fit, and interest line up best. Current concepts include:

• Vertical workflow automation. Software that automates intake, onboarding, and back-office workflows for professional practices, beginning in a fast-growing segment of healthcare. The concept is led by an operator CEO who built and ran a multimillion-dollar software development firm.
• Employer-channel financial services. A platform that delivers banking and financial-wellness benefits to working people through their employers, in partnership with community financial institutions.
• Additional concepts. The pipeline is ongoing, and new concepts reach this stage regularly. The strongest match may be one that is not yet public.

How the Role Works

• Start paid, part time. During concept validation — before the company is formed — Idea Fund pays for the engineering work directly: prototyping, technical discovery, MVP scoping, and early builds. This phase is structured to fit alongside a current job or the final stretch of a degree and give both Idea Fund and the candidate an opportunity to work together.
• Convert to full time. When the concept clears its validation gate and the company is formed and funded, the engineer joins full time as a founding team member, with a meaningful equity stake and cash compensation appropriate for a venture-backed early-stage company.
• Co-founder expectations. We are looking for someone who treats the validation phase as the start of their company: shaping the product, meeting early customers, and earning the founding role.

Responsibilities

• Scope, build and ship a market-ready MVP that can be deployed, demonstrated, and sold to early customers.
• Make foundational decisions on cloud infrastructure, data models, APIs, deployment pipelines, and security.
• Support customer discovery and early pilots — configuring, debugging, and iterating on real-world feedback.
• Establish development standards, documentation practices, CI/CD pipelines, and tooling from scratch, using AI coding tools deliberately and validating every output before it ships.
• Set the bar for code quality and engineering culture that future hires build on.

Qualifications

We evaluate candidates on what they've built and how they think, not years of experience. This is a ground-floor role for strong builders at any career stage.

• Full-stack capability across front end, back end, and infrastructure, with the ability to own the entire technical stack in an early-stage environment.
• Demonstrated ability to ship real software: a production product, a compelling side project, or an open-source contribution.
• Pragmatic technical decision-making: knows when to build for scale and when to ship something that works.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working directly with non-technical stakeholders and customers.
• Self-direction and the ability to thrive with autonomy and limited structure.
• A genuine appetite for the founder path: ownership, risk, and the work of building a company, not just its product.