Founding Engineer

About Porter

Porter is the cloud platform for modern tech companies. They provide the power of the cloud without the complexity and cost, allowing the next generation of builders to run anything, anywhere. Traditional engineering orgs allocate enormous time and money to managing AWS, Azure, and GCP, and quickly become locked in. Porter enables top engineering teams to instantly create production-grade infrastructure on any cloud provider, deploy their application code, and easily monitor and manage it, allowing them to focus on what they do best: building a great product.

Series A funded, profitable, growing 8x in ARR since 2022, headquartered in New York with an SF office. Flat team, high ownership, working with some of the most exciting YC-backed companies.

About the Role

Porter is hiring a Founding Engineer to build at every level of the cloud infrastructure stack. This is a seat for an engineer who has been a founding engineer at a startup or two before, has tackled problems end to end in production environments, and is genuinely excited about building at an infrastructure-specific company.

The work spans production-grade software development, customer-facing problem solving, and ownership of complex technical surfaces inside the Porter platform. You will work in 2-week project cycles with full autonomy to propose and drive your own work, talk to customers directly via Slack, and collaborate closely with the team on the hard infrastructure problems that define the product.

If you are excited about going deep on infrastructure and want a real founding seat at a profitable Series A company growing 8x year over year, this is the role.

What You'll Own

Write production-grade software that powers Porter's platform across cloud infrastructure surfaces

Own end-to-end development lifecycle, from architectural design through production deployment

Debug at the deepest levels: shell into virtual machines, dig through log files, find root causes

Read through open-source repositories to debug third-party dependencies

Collaborate with the team on anything that touches users' infrastructure and provide meaningful feedback

Work in 2-week project cycles with full autonomy to propose and drive your own work

Talk to customers directly via Slack and bring product intuition to infrastructure decisions

Must-Have

5-8 years of building in startups (roughly two startups' worth of experience); founding engineer or earliest technical hire roles preferred

Track record of shipping products end-to-end; can point to code you wrote and systems you owned in production

Genuine excitement about infrastructure problems and the infrastructure space; you want to work on cloud infrastructure specifically

High agency; comfortable operating without a defined playbook or process

Ability to debug and reason through complex systems under pressure

Nice-to-Have

Prior hands-on infrastructure experience (networking, Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud platforms)

Shipped products that scaled to meaningful traction or user base

Experience moving from zero to one on a product or feature; built something novel

Comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching between technical and strategic work