Founding Full Stack Engineer

Job Title: Founding Full Stack Engineer

Salary: $175K-$250K base + 0.5-0.85% equity

Location: New York, NY, 5 days in-office

Visa sponsorship: Not available

Relocation support: Available

Security clearance: Must be eligible for U.S. government security clearance

Company Description

A16z-backed startup modernizing how RF spectrum is licensed, coordinated, and shared for satellite, government, defense, and critical communications use cases.

Job Description

Join a small, deeply technical team building the operating layer for one of the most important and outdated parts of modern infrastructure: RF spectrum licensing and coordination.

Spectrum is what allows satellites, government agencies, defense systems, emergency services, and communications networks to operate without interference. Today, much of the licensing and coordination process still runs through fragmented workflows, manual approvals, legacy systems, and slow-moving regulatory processes.

This company is rebuilding that from the ground up.

They are already in production with active government customers, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, and led by technical founders with deep experience across satellites, defense, and mission-critical systems. The founders are still hands-on and pushing code.

As a Founding Full Stack Engineer, you will own core parts of the platform end to end, with a strong backend emphasis. You will architect and build APIs, authentication systems, role-based access control, data workflows, event-driven systems, and product surfaces used in high-stakes environments by government and commercial customers.

This is not a narrow ticket-taking role. You will make foundational architectural decisions, work directly with customers, and help shape the product while the platform is still young enough for your fingerprints to become part of the concrete.

Why this role is remarkable

• Build mission-critical software with real-world stakes. The systems you build support spectrum workflows used across government, satellite, defense, and regulatory environments, not another generic SaaS dashboard.
• Join at the architectural ground floor. The company is less than a year old, already in production, and still has major pieces of the platform to build. You will make decisions that define the product for years.
• Work with unusually technical founders. The founding team has built satellite systems, scaled complex engineering programs, and comes from serious aerospace and defense backgrounds.
• Backed by top-tier investors. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and is building in a space where technical execution, customer urgency, and market timing are all colliding.
• Own large product surfaces end to end. You will work across backend, infrastructure, and frontend delivery, with roughly 70% backend and 30% frontend ownership.

What you will do

• Architect and build core APIs and backend systems across licensing workflows, a large-scale spectrum data library, and a physics-based spectrum analysis engine
• Design and implement authentication systems, role-based access control, schemas, data models, and production-grade application logic
• Build event-driven and distributed systems using tools such as Kafka or equivalent technologies
• Work across AWS, containers, infrastructure, and deployment systems to support production customers
• Own features from concept through backend implementation to frontend delivery
• Make pragmatic architectural tradeoffs between speed, scalability, reliability, and customer urgency

Discover our full range of relocation jobs with comprehensive support packages to help you relocate and settle in your new location.

• Participate in customer-facing sessions, translate user feedback into product decisions, and present new capabilities in sprint reviews
• Use AI coding tools thoughtfully as part of your engineering workflow, with strong judgment around system design and tradeoffs

The ideal candidate

• 3 to 9 years of experience as a backend-leaning full stack engineer in a high-ownership, 0-to-1 environment
• Has shipped production backend systems at a Seed to Series C startup as an individual contributor
• Strong backend fundamentals across API design, schema design, authentication, authorization, and distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with Python in production
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, especially AWS; AWS GovCloud experience is a plus
• Experience with event-driven or distributed architecture, such as Kafka or equivalent systems
• Comfortable owning features end to end across backend and frontend, while being strongest on backend
• Clear communicator who can explain technical concepts to engineers, founders, and customers
• Energized by hard problems, ambiguity, and high-context ownership
• Eligible for U.S. government security clearance
• Based in or willing to relocate to New York City and work 5 days per week in office

This role is not a fit if

• You want a management role rather than a hands-on IC role
• Your recent work has mostly been maintenance, internal tooling, or narrow slices inside a large company
• You cannot clearly explain systems you have built in the last 1 to 2 years
• You prefer stable scopes, clean tickets, and well-defined execution over 0-to-1 product ownership
• You are not excited about working with government, defense, or mission-critical infrastructure customers

Tech stack

Python, AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, PostgreSQL, Rust, event-driven architecture

Next steps:

1. Apply via this LinkedIn job post.
2. We will review and reach out if there is a strong match.
3. If aligned, we will introduce you directly to the team.
4. If this role is not the right fit, we may suggest and make introductions to other high-signal startup roles we are actively recruiting for, always with your permission.

A quick note on authenticity

This is a real, active role we are supporting in close partnership with the hiring team. We do not post speculative roles and work closely with teams on their actual hiring needs.