Founding Engineer at Sunspell
Location: New York, NY (ONSITE)
Type: Full-time
Apply: Sunspell Careers
About the Company
Sunspell is a six-person venture lab based in New York. We build our own products, supported by a studio arm that handles client work to ensure profitability.
Our founder has an extensive background as a design partner for companies like Partiful, Sentropy (acquired by Discord), Goldcast (acquired by Cvent), Make (acquired by Celonis), and Descartes Labs. We prioritize building our own vision in-house.
The Role
You will own the production application surrounding our intelligence layer. This includes:
- Architecture: Frontend, backend, and Postgres database management.
- System Design: Durable execution state, retries, idempotency, and permissions.
- Deployment: Managing deploys and infrastructure.
- Data-Heavy Interfaces: Building the tools people work inside all day, including tables, relationships, filters, history, and approval workflows.
- Tech Stack: Deep expertise in React and TypeScript; Node or Python for the backend. We write a lot of MCP servers and build with Claude Code daily.
Requirements
- Experience: 7+ years of shipping software, with hands-on coding experience within the last year.
- Collaboration: We operate with design and engineering in the same room; there is no handoff.
- Mindset: We are looking for someone who has already started something of their own.
- Autonomy: We are a team of six. Nothing you build goes through a committee before it ships, and nothing you break, you fix alone.
Compensation & Ownership
- Ownership: You should own a piece of what you build here.
- Flexibility: We do not post a fixed percentage because the equity depends on what you end up carrying. We prefer to have an honest, flexible conversation to ensure the arrangement is fair.
How to Apply
Please send your resume or GitHub profile, along with the most ambitious thing you have built mostly on your own.
Note: We value rough work that actually worked over polished work that never shipped.
If this role isn't for you but a name comes to mind, please pass it along.