Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Remote): First Engineering Hire

Fully remote

Full-time (40 hours/week) from day one · Long-term role · You report directly to the founder

The mission

We’re part of ScaleValley, a family of internet companies with two previous exits behind us. We’re building a new AI platform that helps professionals connect with podcast hosts, PR professionals, journalists, industry experts, and thought leaders. Our vision is to make discovery, research, personalized outreach and follow-ups fully autonomous. We’ve spent the past 3–4 months developing the initial version with a third-party development agency, and now we’re hiring our first in-house engineer to take full technical ownership and lead it toward launch. You’ll assess the existing code and integrations, decide what to keep or improve, and build a reliable product customers can use and trust.

We know what we’re building and why. You’ll get clear product direction and priorities directly from the founder, so you can focus on engineering. Within that direction, you’ll have the freedom to choose the technical approach, architecture and implementation details you believe are best. We welcome better ideas and keep meetings and process light so most of your time goes into building, testing and shipping.

About us

Our software helps professionals discover relevant people, understand why they’re a good fit, and build valuable connections across media, PR, and their industries.

The founder has spent years in this market. He built and sold a podcast production agency and a podcast host database, so he knows the customers and the data. You’ll be the first engineer on the team, with meaningful ownership of how the product is engineered and brought to market.

What we sell

A customer describes their background, expertise and goals. The platform researches relevant contacts and opportunities, recommends the strongest matches, and creates personalized outreach grounded in each person’s work. Over time, it will also automate sending, follow-ups and reply drafting.

Our customers include founders, authors, executives and experts seeking meaningful media and industry connections, as well as PR agencies managing outreach for multiple clients. Podcast and media outreach are the starting points, with a broader vision for professional connections.

What the full product does

• Search in plain English. Typing “parenting podcasts with big audiences” or “reporters who cover fintech” returns a ranked list of active shows and writers, each with a verified email, audience size and fit score.

• Pitches written one person at a time, in the customer’s voice, mentioning the episode or article that person just published. Subject lines test themselves and the winners stay.

• Sending from the customer’s own inbox on a natural schedule, or from managed inboxes we warm up, with deliverability checks and dead contacts removed automatically.

• Follow-ups in the same thread until someone replies.

• One inbox for every reply, with a drafted answer waiting, plus open and reply alerts in the app and in Slack.

• Website visitor identification: a small pixel shows who is browsing the customer’s site, enriches them and queues outreach to the warm ones.

• Mention alerts on the customer’s name and keywords, a tracker for every booked interview and article, and an earned media value in dollars that agencies can export for their clients.

• Unlimited profiles for clients and executives, free team seats, an AI advisor that reviews campaigns and suggests the next move, and sequences across email, LinkedIn and text for outreach beyond press and podcasts.

Not all of this exists yet. Researching the right people and creating useful, personalized outreach come first, because the broader automation only works when the matches are genuinely relevant. Sending, follow-ups, reply drafting, visitor identification and monitoring are planned for later stages.

Why this role exists

We’ve worked with a third-party development agency to build the initial version, including the core codebase, product designs and integrations. We’re now bringing development in-house and looking for an experienced engineer to take ownership of what’s been built, improve reliability and lead the product toward launch.

The hard parts sit where things connect: databases, external APIs, patchy data, background jobs, AI research steps and the interface on top. When one piece fails, everything after it fails too. There are two existing implementations to understand and reconcile, and the core workflows still need testing with real users and real data before they’re ready for production.

You’ll be inheriting code you didn’t write, chasing bugs across services and making decisions without all the facts. Keep what works. If something needs a bigger rewrite, make the case for it, with the cost and the migration plan.

What you’ll do

1. Own the path to launch

Understand what runs today, what has been tested and which technical blockers stand between the current product and the agreed launch scope. Propose a practical engineering plan and timeline, then deliver it.

• Make the whole journey work start to finish: the customer enters and confirms their profile, the system researches them, recommends shows, saves the results, drafts pitches they can edit and finds contact details when asked.

• Fix the failures that matter most and check each fix in the running app against the live integrations.

• Handle everything technical the paid launch needs, including payments and account access.

2. Make the matches and pitches good

Improve how well the system understands each customer: who they are, what they want right now, where they’ve already appeared, which audiences fit them and which shows would realistically say yes.

• Judge recommendations against evidence, with a review process you can repeat. Keep facts, estimates and guesses clearly apart.

• Make matches and pitches more relevant, and track what each improvement does to speed and cost.

• Be honest when the data runs thin: people with little online footprint, people who share a name with someone else, stale records, or a niche with only a handful of good shows.

3. Own the databases, APIs and background jobs

You own the data models, migrations, access controls, data quality, caching and how data moves between services.

• Handle timeouts, rate limits, malformed responses, retries, concurrency and jobs that die halfway through.

• Make sure nothing runs twice, no email goes out twice and no customer loses saved work.

• Track what each provider costs, enforce the spending limits we agree on, and make failed or half-finished work easy to see and recover.

4. Own releases and production

Deployments, monitoring, alerts that mean something, backups, restores, rollbacks and production fires are yours. So is keeping each customer’s data private and separate from everyone else’s.

Check changes before and after each release. When something breaks, find out why, explain it and stop it from coming back. Write enough documentation that another good engineer could pick up the system and run it.

5. Keep improving the product

Ship across the frontend and backend. The founder sets product priorities based on customer needs; you recommend the best technical way to deliver them and explain trade-offs. Turn agreed work into reliable releases, flag risks early and demonstrate the results from a customer’s point of view.

Your first 60 days

You’re accountable for delivery from the start. The milestones below assume a full-time commitment of 40 hours a week. In week one we agree the exact launch scope, the acceptance cases that must pass, and number targets for completion rate, recommendation quality, processing time and running cost. If something gets in the way, raise it early and bring a recommendation and a plan.

First 7 days: take control and ship

• Get the existing apps running, walk through the core customer journey and recommend a single path to production.

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