Senior Software Engineer (Founding-Level)

About the role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer at the founding level, someone who has already built and owned something from scratch, not someone looking for their first 0-to-1 experience. You'll work at the core of Bustem's product: the real-time detection and enforcement systems that protect 120+ brands from counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers. This is a peer-level technical hire, not a junior seat executing someone else's spec. You'll work closely with our CTO and have real autonomy to make architecture and build-vs-buy calls independently, and to raise the technical bar for the rest of the team.

Responsibilities

• Bring senior judgment to architecture, code quality, and engineering process
• Mentor other engineers on the team
• Construct AI-powered scraping and detection systems across marketplaces, social platforms, and the open web
• Build agents and workflows that automate takedown reporting at scale
• Design and own scalable backend systems and APIs using Next.js, Postgres, and TypeScript
• Take real production-incident ownership
• Leverage LLMs to cut manual engineering work

Requirements

• 5-10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Meaningful time at an early-stage or bootstrapped startup, ideally as a founding or near-founding engineer
• Have owned a system end-to-end at real scale
• 1+ years operating with minimal senior oversight
• Comfortable making build-vs-buy and architecture tradeoffs independently
• Real production-incident ownership, not just being on a team that had incidents
• Track record of shipping to real, paying customers
• Proficient with Next.js, Postgres, and TypeScript
• Comfortable integrating AI/LLMs into engineering workflows

What Great Looks Like

• You've built something here from scratch that didn't exist before
• Other engineers are better because you're on the team
• You make sound architecture calls independently
• You treat production incidents as your problem to solve
• Bustem's detection and enforcement systems get faster, more reliable, and harder to game because you're behind them

Location

On-Site, New York, NY

Pay

$200,000-$250,000 base salary

Equity: 0.25-0.5%

Benefits

• Daily Lunch and Dinner Stipend
• Bi-weekly team events
• Direct, close working relationship with the founder and CTO