Founding Backend Engineer (Full-Stack Experience) // Insurtech & Financial Services

Job Description

We’re a stealth startup backed by a repeat founder and top-tier investors.

We’re rebuilding the financial plumbing behind a trillion-dollar asset class — commercial real estate insurance — one of the largest, most archaic financial systems in the United States.

Today, this market still runs on manual workflows, fragmented data, and decades-old infrastructure.

Our top competitors represent over $300B in combined market value, and the core workflows in this industry have not been meaningfully disrupted in decades.

We’re building an AI-native platform that ingests fragmented insurance data across documents, APIs, and third-party systems, and transforms it into a unified, structured layer for underwriting and decision-making.

Our goal is ambitious but grounded: to build the defining platform in insurance and insurtech.

Incubated by a team that has already built two successful companies in this exact industry and ICP, we’re now assembling a small, high-caliber engineering team to build the next one.

We’re looking for a Founding Backend Engineer to build and own core backend systems from the ground up.

This will be one of the first engineering hires.

The Role

As a Founding Backend Engineer, you will:

• Design and build backend systems that integrate with numerous external data sources
• Own data ingestion, normalization, and serving layers across the platform
• Work with complex, inconsistent financial and insurance data
• Build systems that handle rate limits, failures, and changing schemas across third-party APIs
• Partner closely with the founding team on architecture and product decisions
• Contribute across backend systems, infrastructure, and APIs
• Grow into a team leadership role as the company scales

What You’ll Own

• External data integrations across multiple third-party providers with varying APIs and constraints
• API integration framework including authentication, rate limiting, retries, caching, and fault tolerance
• Data pipelines and normalization systems to create a consistent internal data layer
• Data consistency and reconciliation across conflicting external sources
• Batch and real-time processing systems that continuously update underlying data
• Core backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure
• Reliability, deployment, and observability across backend services

Who Are You?

• You have experience building backend systems in production environments
• You’ve operated at a high-growth startup or similarly fast-paced environment
• You’ve worked with complex external APIs and real-world data issues
• You think in systems and tradeoffs, not just endpoints
• You are comfortable owning critical infrastructure end-to-end
• You can operate as a senior individual contributor and grow into a team lead
• You care deeply about correctness, reliability, and system design

Technical Skills

• Strong backend experience (Python, Node, or similar)
• Experience designing APIs and backend services
• Experience integrating with external APIs and third-party systems
• Experience with data pipelines, ETL systems, or data infrastructure
• Familiarity with async processing, queues, and caching systems
• Experience with CI/CD and production deployments

Required:

• Experience in insurance, insurtech, financial services, or similarly regulated / accuracy-critical environments
• Ability to design creative, pragmatic solutions to complex backend systems and real-world data problems
• AI-native mindset — excels at building and shipping systems using LLMs, automation, and modern AI tooling to significantly increase engineering velocity and system capability

Bonus

• Experience working with complex or high-volume data systems
• Experience in highly regulated or compliance-heavy environments

Culture & Expectations

• This is an intense, output-driven environment.
• We operate at high velocity with a small team of exceptional builders.
• We operate on a 9-9-6 cadence — because rebuilding an industry demands it.
• High ownership. High accountability. High standards.
• We don’t care about pedigree, background, or years of experience. We care about ability.
• We are looking for the top 0.0001% — people who take pride in building systems that must work.

Compensation

• We pay top-of-market compensation — both in salary and equity — for exceptional talent.
• We believe individuals who operate at a significantly higher level can have outsized impact, and should be compensated accordingly.
• Clear path to leadership as the team grows

Logistics

• NYC-based, in-person
• 5–6 days per week in office

Who This Is Ideal For

A backend engineer who has been an early and foundational hire at a high-growth company (Series A / B), and has built quickly under real constraints.

Someone who has seen a company scale — and wishes they had been there even earlier.

Someone who has consistently operated at a high level, but due to timing, role, or cap table constraints has not fully realized the upside of their impact.

Someone with a chip on their shoulder who wants to prove they can build and own critical systems from day one.

Someone who could work anywhere, but chooses to be here — drawn by the mission, with the chance to shape both the system and the team as it grows, where speed and impact are meaningfully higher and the upside is generational.

Why Join Now?

You’d be joining at the exact moment when:

• The company is fully incubated and de-risked by a proven founder
• The founder has built two successful companies already in this domain
• The wedge is validated, pipeline active, customers already aligned
• The market is at a breaking point and demanding change
• The next 18 months will define a multi-billion-dollar outcome

If you’re hungry, relentless, and want to help rearchitect a trillion-dollar market — reach out. There are very few opportunities to be this early on something of this scale.