Founding Engineer

About Stackbirds

Most small businesses are run by people who are great at the thing they do and stuck doing everything else. The bookkeeping, the follow-ups, the quotes, the scheduling, the hundred small operational decisions a day that never made it into why they started. Big companies have teams and systems for all of it. Everyone else has nights and weekends.

Stackbirds is building the platform where a small business comes to run their business. One place that handles the operational weight, so the people doing skilled work can stay focused on the work. We're early, we have real businesses using us, and we're partnered with universities embedding our platform into how the next generation learns to run a company.

The founder previously built and exited companies and held senior product and engineering roles at Meta, Airbnb, and Canva. The throughline across everything she's built: tools for skilled people who don't have the business infrastructure that bigger players take for granted.

About the role

As Founding Engineer, you'll build the technical foundation of that platform alongside the founder. This is a build-from-the-ground-up role: you'll make the early architecture decisions, ship the first production systems, and help shape what the engineering team becomes. You'll work directly with the businesses we serve, so you'll see what you build land in someone's actual day. This is for someone who wants the scope and ownership of a founding seat, and who's drawn to the problem of giving small businesses the kind of infrastructure that used to require a whole team.

Responsibilities

• Build the core platform that small businesses rely on to run their day-to-day operations.
• Make foundational calls on architecture, infrastructure, tooling, and the engineering stack.
• Ship end to end — from the systems underneath to the experience a business owner actually touches.
• Work directly with the businesses using Stackbirds and turn what you learn into product.
• Set the early engineering culture, standards, and hiring bar as the team grows.

Requirements

• Strong full-stack or backend engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems end to end.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward shipping; you can go from a rough problem to a working system without a spec handed to you.
• Product instinct — you care about who you're building for and what their day is like, not just the architecture.
• Genuine interest in small businesses and the people who run them.
• Readiness to take on founding-level ownership and scope.

Nice to have

• Experience as an early engineer at a startup.
• Background in tools for small businesses, operations, fintech, or B2B SaaS.
• Experience standing up infrastructure and deployment pipelines from scratch.
• Fluency with modern AI tooling as a means to build a better product, not as the product itself.

Benefits

• Founding equity and meaningful ownership.
• Direct partnership with the founder and a real say in technical direction.
• The chance to build a company's technical foundation from day one.