About this opportunity
nineDots.io lists this Lead Software Engineer opportunity in new york, New York. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
New York City | Five days on-site in Manhattan
$250,000–$500,000 base + up to 2% equity
Right, the important bit first.
This isn’t one of those “Founding Engineer” jobs where you’ll arrive as employee 47 and spend your first month sitting in planning meetings.
You’ll be the first engineering hire, joining two founders in a small, seriously profitable business that has gone from zero to significant eight-figure revenue in under a year — without raising outside funding.
The company is building a real-time pricing and decisioning platform for a fast-moving consumer marketplace. The engineering problems look a lot like electronic trading: huge amounts of changing market data, automated bidding, live inventory and decisions where the financial impact shows up almost immediately.
You’ll sit beside the founders in the office and own the core technology behind it.
What you’ll actually be doing
Building and owning the pricing engine, bidding infrastructure and data systems that power the platform
Turning AI and model research into production systems that run continuously
Building proper experimentation and A/B testing frameworks around pricing decisions
Improving the speed, throughput and reliability of the bidding systems
Creating AI-powered tooling for triage, production failures and model-drift detection
Making the big early architecture calls and setting the engineering standard as the team grows
Getting very close to the commercial side of the business — what you ship can affect revenue within hours
The non-negotiables
You have 3–10 years of professional software engineering experience
You have genuine 0→1 experience. You’ve personally taken an ambiguous product or technically difficult system from an idea into production — ideally as a founder, founding engineer or one of the first engineers
You’ve worked somewhere with a genuinely high engineering bar, whether that’s a top technology company or a smaller team solving very hard problems
You’ve designed, built and operated data-intensive production systems
You’re strong with Python, or close enough technically that moving into a Python-heavy environment won’t be an issue
You have proper platform, infrastructure or distributed-systems experience
You’re naturally good with data and comfortable making decisions when the information is incomplete, noisy or moving quickly
AI is already part of how you build. You’re using LLMs, agents and modern developer tooling in real work, not just playing around with them at the weekend
Your career shows progression, ownership and things you have actually shipped
You’re comfortable disagreeing with smart people, backing your opinion and changing it when the evidence proves you wrong
You’re still a very hands-on engineer. This isn’t a people-management or operations role
You can work on-site in Manhattan five days a week
You already have unrestricted US work authorisation. Unfortunately, sponsorship isn’t available
You’ll probably be especially interesting if
You’ve founded something yourself or joined very early and helped it achieve real commercial traction
You’ve built systems around pricing, trading, marketplaces, bidding or optimisation
You’ve worked on production AI, model evaluation, automated operations or experimentation
You’re interested in markets, pricing or trading systems
You have a strong computer science background
Why it’s worth a look
You’ll be joining a tiny, profitable team with no investors breathing down its neck and no layers of approval. There’s a lot still to build, the problems are properly difficult and the upside is real.
You won’t be handed a polished roadmap. You’ll work things out with the founders, challenge them when needed and take full ownership of what gets built.
The base salary is $250,000–$500,000, depending on experience and the level of impact you can have, with up to 2% equity on top.
The process
A 30-minute chat with one of the founders
A one-hour technical interview with the technical co-founder
A take-home exercise
A presentation of your work to the team
A final on-site meeting
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Worksite address
new york, NY, 10261, US
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.