Founding Engineer

About the role

KIASA is an early-stage technology company based in Singapore, building AI-native software and infrastructure. They are seeking a Founding Engineer to work directly with the CEO, take meaningful ownership of the technical direction, and help architect and build the core platform from the ground up. The role is 100% remote, worldwide.

Benefits

• Founding-level ownership to influence product, architecture, and technical strategy.
• Direct access to the CEO and company leadership.
• Opportunity to build the technical foundation from the beginning rather than inheriting legacy architecture.
• AI-native development approach, building around modern AI capabilities from the start.
• Global remote environment with opportunities to grow as the company and engineering organization expand.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build KIASA’s core platform from the ground up.
• Develop production backend services, APIs, and customer‑facing features.
• Build AI and LLM‑powered product workflows, including RAG, semantic search, and embeddings.
• Design databases, data models, queues, and asynchronous workflows.
• Integrate external APIs, models, and third‑party platforms.
• Build reliable authentication, authorization, and data‑access patterns.
• Deploy and operate services in cloud environments such as AWS or Azure.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems.
• Improve application performance, reliability, security, and infrastructure cost.
• Debug problems across application, AI, data, and infrastructure layers.
• Make technology‑selection and build‑vs‑buy decisions.
• Review architecture and code.
• Work directly with the CEO on technical and product priorities.
• Help interview, hire, and mentor future engineers.
• Help establish the engineering culture and technical standards of the company.

Requirements

• Significant professional software engineering experience and a track record of building production systems.
• Comfort owning problems rather than only implementing predefined tickets.
• Experience with backend architecture, APIs, databases, distributed systems, AI/LLM applications, cloud infrastructure, deployment, observability, system reliability, and technical decision‑making.
• Experience as a Senior, Staff, Principal, Lead, Founding, or early‑stage startup engineer.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including experience with languages such as Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or Java.
• Ability to take an ambiguous problem, understand what needs to be built, make sensible technical decisions, implement the solution, deploy it, and improve it based on real usage.
• Capability to grow into a broader engineering leadership role while remaining technically strong and hands‑on.

Pay

USD $50–$70 per hour.