Founding Engineer, Product

Pennant, New York, New York

The role

Full-time. Founding team. New York City, in-person required. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO and works directly with both founders and customers.

Own a customer workflow from understanding the problem through repeated production use.

This is a full-stack engineering role with product judgment and customer ownership. You will build on an existing application, connecting interfaces, backend APIs, persistent state and integrations into complete workflows. You should be comfortable tracing a user action from the browser to the database, and owning what happens when only part of that sequence succeeds. You will work directly with customers to observe how they work, challenge assumptions, prototype interactions and follow up after release.

All jobs

Founding Engineer, Product

Pennant, New York, New York

The role

Full-time. Founding team. New York City, in-person required. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO and works directly with both founders and customers.

Own a customer workflow from understanding the problem through repeated production use.

What you will do

What you'll own

Work with founders and customers to turn an ambiguous request into a bounded problem. Agree on what success means, make tradeoffs explicit and build the smallest complete workflow that addresses it.
Build across the interface, backend APIs, database transactions and integrations. Trace existing behavior before changing it, evolve contracts safely, and connect working components rather than defaulting to a rewrite.
Make dense evidence easy to inspect and act on. Use prototypes and customer observation to improve navigation, source review and decision capture. Show uncertainty and incomplete coverage without making the interface overwhelming.
Build useful AI features, such as evidence-backed research summaries. Evaluate their behavior on representative cases, use deterministic code where it works better, and make consequential actions subject to appropriate human review.
Preserve decisions, corrections, rationale and approval history. Enforce permissions and make imports, retries and partial failures recoverable without duplicate records or lost work. Make saved, pending, unavailable and demonstration states clear to users.
Own onboarding and follow-through for your workflow. Measure completion, repeat use and manual effort. Build the internal tools needed to support customers without turning every request into a founder intervention.

You will work closely with our data and AI engineering counterpart, who owns source ingestion, extraction and the underlying data-quality contract. You own the application workflow and how customers inspect, correct, approve and use its outputs.

When a customer encounters a problem in your workflow, you own getting it resolved, bringing in the appropriate engineer rather than fixing every component yourself. Together, you will define how data changes affect customer corrections and approvals. We will scope your initial work so you can make progress even if the other role has not yet been filled.

The founders remain responsible for company priorities and commercial commitments. Founders and domain reviewers provide policy interpretation; you will help translate that expertise into clear product behavior.

Your first 90 days

By day 30: Observe a selected customer's workflow, agree on the initial scope and acceptance criteria, and ship a useful improvement. Establish a baseline for completion time and manual effort.
By day 60: Own the scoped workflow through onboarding and production use. Test permissions and recovery paths, instrument usage, and add evaluations for model-based behavior.
By day 90: Carry a customer request through to accepted production use without a founder coordinating each step. Show evidence of repeat use where the workflow's cadence permits, explain the remaining friction and identify the next improvement from observed behavior.

We will choose the initial customer and measures together. A shipped feature is a starting point; success includes whether the intended user can complete the task reliably.

Founding Engineer, Product

The role

Founding Engineer, Product

The role

What you will do

What you'll own

Your first 90 days

What you need

Problems you might tackle

Our stack

About Pennant

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