Founding Engineer

***Equity\-first role. Full salary kicks in when our seed closes (active round). Read "The Deal" below before applying.*** Global trade is a $2T\+ industry that literally moves the world. It still runs on spreadsheets, endless email threads, and fax\-era software. Everyone agrees it's broken. **We're fixing it.** **aradus** is building the AI\-native operating system for global supply chains: a single intelligent platform that automates trade operations end\-to\-end for importers and exporters. Where we actually are: We built the product. We put it in the hands of customers. **We went from zero to paying revenue in under a quarter.** The codebase is live in production, our agents are processing real shipments and documents every day, and the feedback loop with users is running. This isn't an conceptual idea. We're a small, deeply technical founding team, and we're hiring our first engineer. \-\-\- **The Role** This isn't a role where you pull well\-defined Jira tickets from a backlog. As our Founding Engineer, you'll operate across the entire stack, make foundational architectural decisions, and ship relentlessly. You'll work directly with the founders to shape the product, the engineering culture, and the trajectory of the company. You'll identify what actually matters, build it, and iterate against real\-world friction from real users. **What You Will Own** * **Autonomous AI Systems** . Architect agents that process messy, unstructured trade data, execute complex multi\-step workflows, and build organizational memory over time. We're not building chatbot wrappers. * **Resilient Data Pipelines** . Design scalable ingestion and reconciliation pipelines across third\-party integrations (carriers, ERPs, customs, banking) with strict idempotency, deduplication, and retry strategies. * **Core Platform Architecture** . Drive full\-stack development on our multi\-tenant TypeScript SaaS: complex domain logic, real\-time syncs, heavy background job orchestration. * **AI Infrastructure** . Design the primitives our agents and pipelines stand on. Think modular tool layers, reusable extraction frameworks, evaluation harnesses, prompt and schema versioning, and the abstractions that let us add a new agent or document type in hours instead of weeks. As the surface area grows, the leverage of getting these primitives right compounds. * **Product Trajectory** . Talk to users, understand the deep complexities of global logistics, and translate those insights directly into the codebase. \-\-\- **Who You Are** * **A builder of agentic systems** . You've moved beyond basic prompts. You understand tool calling, multi\-step reasoning, structured outputs, and context management. You've shipped real agentic systems in modern TypeScript AI frameworks. * **An infrastructure thinker** . You instinctively reach for primitives, modularity, and clean abstractions. You're comfortable designing the underlying AI infrastructure (the tools, schemas, evals, and reusable building blocks) so the system gets faster to extend, not slower, as it grows. * **Startup DNA** . You bias toward action. You know how to ruthlessly cut scope to ship today while still investing in architecture so it doesn't collapse at scale. * **A full\-stack pragmatist** . Equally comfortable designing a Postgres schema and shipping a snappy React component. We're a TypeScript shop end\-to\-end. **Bonus Points** * You've worked in supply chain, logistics, freight, or trade. Whether as an engineer at a 3PL, freight forwarder, carrier, customs platform, or importer/exporter, you understand BLs, POs, invoices, containers, and the operational mess we're automating away. You won't need a glossary on day one. * You've been a founder before. Even if it didn't work out, you have deep empathy for the pace, stakes, and extreme ownership required at the zero\-to\-one stage. * You've taken AI to production. You've actually deployed, monitored, and scaled agentic systems in live production environments, well beyond local scripts and toy projects. \-\-\- **The Deal: Honest Version** We're pre\-seed, moving fast, and completely transparent about where we stand. * **Cash compensation: not yet.** We can't pay a salary today. Full competitive base salary kicks in the moment our active seed round closes. Until then, we're asking you to bet on aradus the way the founders are: with your time, your equity, and your conviction. * **Equity: founding\-level and meaningful** . You're our first engineering hire, and the equity reflects exactly that. * **The upside** . A ground\-floor seat to rewire a multi\-trillion\-dollar industry. A live product with paying customers. Revenue on the board. A short, fast path from "build the thing" to "scale the thing" once we close the round. **We're looking for someone who wants to join us full\-time the moment we raise, and is willing to come in early to help us get there.**