Founding Staff Engineer
About the company
Outpost is an AI-native marketing company focused entirely on Reddit. We make brands the most recommended name in the communities where their buyers decide what to buy. Because Google ranks Reddit near the top of search and AI answers cite it more than any other source, that recommendation carries into Google and ChatGPT too.
Reddit has quietly become one of the most trusted places on the internet. Before people buy almost anything today, they go to Reddit for honest, unfiltered opinions from real people. Most brands know this and still cannot operate there. The culture intimidates them, every subreddit has its own rules, and marketing that hides gets punished. We take the opposite approach: everything we do is white-hat and fully in the open. We represent a brand as itself, or as a named member of its team, and we earn attention by being genuinely useful in the conversations that matter. No fake accounts and no pretending to be someone we are not.
Our work for a client comes in two halves:
- We join the conversations already happening across their space.
- We build the brand a home of its own—a subreddit we set up, grow, and run until it becomes their community.
Our platform handles monitoring, prioritization, drafting, and measurement behind both. People make the final call on everything that posts.
About the role
You will be our first full-time engineer working on Outpost's product. The product has two goals:
- Supporting our delivery: As an agency, every hour a person spends on a client is a real cost, and the product aims to reduce it. It surfaces only the threads worth acting on, learns a subreddit's culture, and drafts in the brand's voice. It includes quality checks before anything goes live and provides operational tooling for marketers running the accounts. Every bit of leverage you build here improves our margin and increases how many clients one person can handle.
- Customer-facing product: Today customers see only reporting, but they should see the entire channel: what buyers are saying about them, where they stand against competitors, which threads moved their search positions and AI citations, and what to do next. This is the piece that turns an agency into a company with a product.
Requirements
- Staff-level full stack engineering: You have designed, shipped, and owned production systems end to end.
- Production LLM experience, not demos: You know evals, retries, cost, and latency in practice.
- Infrastructure ownership: Cloud, data, and deploys are yours. There is no platform or infra team.
- Reddit nativeness is a huge plus: Years as an active Redditor, communities you have moderated or grown, anything you have built on the Reddit API. Not a requirement, but it shortens your ramp more than anything else on this list.
Compensation
$72,000 – $150,000 USD per year, plus 0.5% to 2% equity vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. The cash range is wide because the role is open across the Americas and the cost of living varies. What moves you within it is your experience, your local market, and how much of this you carry on your own. The equity moves against the cash: take less cash and you take more of the company, up to 2%, which is the top of the normal band for a first engineer.
Schedule
This is a full-time independent contractor arrangement (1099 in the US, straightforward contractor agreement elsewhere). No health benefits or paid time off are provided. We already pay contractors across borders in their own currency, so getting you paid is solved wherever you are.
Location
Fully remote, anywhere in the Americas: Canada, the US, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, or South America. All locations are equally fine.
Timeline
Start date is between October 15 and November 15, 2026.