Founding Hacker

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We build in the deep end with sensitive health data. There is zero room for error. We're selective by design. If you join, you get founder-level upside, the sharpest tools, and real career compression. What takes 10 years elsewhere happens here in 12 to 18 months. You'll raise our velocity, and we'll raise your ceiling.

Every decision matters

A bug doesn't just break features, it breaks trust. A performance regression doesn't just slow things down; it can delay care. This isn't a job; it's a founding role with founding stakes.

How you operate

• High agency, low ego: insight → plan → ship, fast. You create momentum and clarity.
• First principles: start from constraints, reason about trade-offs, decide, and document.
• Systems taste: simple cores; sharp, modern tools only where they compound.
• Clear communicator: crisp RFCs, diagrams, and postmortems that drive decisions.
• Relentless execution: compress years into months without losing judgment or quality.
• Secure by default: threat models, least privilege, encryption, auditable trails.
• Builder operator: You ship it and you run it. SLOs, cost, performance, and reliability.

What you'll do

• Build, break, learn, and ship across core product, internal platforms, and high upside experiments.
• Turn ambiguity into working services, APIs, and UIs with clean boundaries and clear ownership.
• Own end-to-end: data models, security posture, UX, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Prototype in days, harden in weeks, scale in months. Kill weak ideas quickly and double down on winners.
• Instrument everything: metrics, traces, logs, and audits wired into CI/CD and SLO gates.
• Create the paved road: reproducible dev envs, templates, generators, and guardrails that 10x throughput.
• Operate with safety: feature flags, canaries, shadow traffic, chaos drills, and one-click rollbacks.
• Optimise hot paths: shrink p99s, remove 30 to 50% latency, and cut waste without adding complexity.
• Lead incidents well: contain, communicate, recover, write the postmortem, and fix the root cause.
• Shape the team: define standards, run tight interviews, build a culture of taste and speed.

Non negotiables

• 5+ years shipping production systems at real scale (1M+ DAU, 10k+ RPS, or TB per day pipelines) with end-to-end ownership.
• Distributed systems mastery: explain and apply Raft or Paxos, CRDTs, vector clocks, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly once semantics; choose consistency models with intent.
• Regulated environments: shipped in healthcare, fintech, or payments; implemented HIPAA, ABDM, PCI, or RBI controls, data residency, and passed audits.
• Security first engineering: threat modelling, mTLS, key rotation, tokenisation, least privilege IAM; you spot data leak risks in reviews.
• SRE discipline: define SLIs and SLOs, lead incidents, write postmortems that drive fixes, design for graceful degradation.
• Measurable 10x wins with evidence: for example, p99 1s → 200 ms, 50%+ cost reductions, or 10x throughput without reliability loss.
• Range across the stack: backend, infra, and modern frontend; you can own a feature from RFC to prod and take on a call.
• Clear writing: docs and diagrams that non-engineers and auditors can understand.

Differentiators

• PII or PHI at scale with provable controls: RLS, tenant isolation, tokenisation or deterministic encryption, retention and deletion workflows, immutable audit trails.
• OSS impact: meaningful PRs or maintainer roles in PostHog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Kafka or Redpanda, Envoy, Temporal, Kubernetes, Sentry, Qdrant or pgvector.
• Published depth: papers, conference talks, or a serious blog series on systems, performance, security, or data platforms.
• India regulatory exposure: DPDP, ABDM or FHIR, NPCI or UPI, RBI circulars, PCI DSS; you've navigated audits and localisation.
• Multi-region architecture: active-active or fast failover with tight RPO and RTO; you run chaos and DR drills, not just plan them.
• Privacy preserving compute: TEEs such as Nitro Enclaves, differential privacy, k-anonymity or l diversity, or practical ZK or MPC exposure.
• ML in production: retrieval pipelines and eval harnesses, redaction and guardrails, serving with vLLM or TGI on GPUs, Hugging Face Hub for models and datasets.
• Performance and migrations: flamegraphs and eBPF, lock contention fixes, cache design, zero-downtime schema and service cutovers.

The stack

• Languages and runtimes: Go, Rust, TypeScript or Node, Python; Bash, Nix, Dev Containers for reproducible envs.
• Data and streaming: SQLite; Postgres (RLS, partitioning, logical replication); ClickHouse; S3 with Parquet or Iceberg with LakeFS; Redis; Kafka or Redpanda; Debezium; Schema Registry.
• Search and vectors: Postgres with pgvector; Qdrant; OpenSearch.
• Services and workflows: gRPC with Protobuf; REST with OpenAPI; GraphQL where it helps; Temporal for durable workflows.
• Frontend: React with Server Components; TypeScript; Tailwind with Radix; TanStack Query; Zod; Playwright for E2E.
• Infra and platform: AWS (EKS, RDS or Aurora, S3, KMS, IAM); Terraform; ArgoCD; GitHub Actions; Karpenter; Cilium; Cloudflare (Workers, Queues, Durable Objects); GHCR or ECR; Renovate.
• Observability and product: OpenTelemetry; Prometheus with Alertmanager; Grafana; Loki; Tempo and Jaeger; eBPF profiling with Parca or Pyroscope; Sentry; PostHog for analytics, feature flags, and session replay; OpenFeature.
• Security and compliance: SPIFFE or SPIRE mTLS; OIDC or WebAuthn; Vault with KMS; OPA or Gatekeeper or Cedar policies; Sigstore or Cosign with SLSA provenance; Syft, Grype, or Trivy for SBOM and vuln scanning; SOPS or age; tamper-evident audit logs with S3 Object Lock and Rekor; least privilege IAM.
• Intelligence and ML: dbt; Airbyte for ingest; Great Expectations for data quality; Hugging Face Hub, Transformers, Datasets, and Evaluate; PEFT or bitsandbytes for efficient fine-tuning; vLLM or TGI for serving; Langfuse for LLM tracing and evals; MLflow or Aim for experiment tracking; hybrid retrieval with BM25 plus vectors via pgvector or Qdrant.
• DX and quality: Make or Task with Dagger or BuildKit; pre-commit; ESLint and Prettier; Go linters; Ruff and Black; Tilt or Skaffold for local K8S; codegen via Buf for Protobuf; strict PR gates.

Reality

• Founder pace and founder stakes. We work 80 to 100-hour weeks because we're obsessed, not supervised.
• We will debate an indexing strategy or crypto choice at 11 PM if it changes correctness, security, or latency.
• We ship weekly, often daily, and measure impact in p99, error budgets, RPO and RTO, and cost per 1k requests.
• Standards are uncompromising, especially with money, health, and privacy on the line.
• Ownership is end-to-end: RFC → design → code → tests → rollout → on call → postmortem → fix.

Don't apply if

• You need heavy mentorship, detailed tickets, or rigid processes to start moving.
• You optimise for work-life balance over growth, impact, and ownership.
• Secure by default feels optional, or compliance is just box-checking.
• You prefer predictable, low-variance work over ambiguous problems with real stakes.
• You can't explain technical decisions clearly to non-engineers and auditors.
• You equate speed with skipping tests, instrumentation, and reviews.
• You avoid writing: specs, diagrams, and postmortems that lead to change.
• You resist data: you won't set SLIs or SLOs, measure cost, or run experiments.
• You avoid outages, trade-offs, or hard migrations.
• You prefer politics and consensus to small team trust and decisive action.
• You think innovation, speed, performance, and reliability are someone else's job.

Signals you'll thrive here

• You've owned a hard production system end to end and improved it with evidence.
• You write to think, debate respectfully, and change your mind with new data.
• You get energy from building, operating, and iterating with users in the loop.
• You care about slope, not pedigree.

How to apply

DM with 2 to 3 links to work you're proud of (repo, PR, X profile, talk, blog), or apply here on LinkedIn. If you're close but not a perfect match, apply anyway. We optimise for hunger, drive and proof.