Senior Founding Software Engineer

Navii is working with a stealth-mode, early-stage startup — founded by a team of ex-Google leaders — to help them hire a Senior Founding Software Engineer. The company is building the systems that power a new monetization platform, and this is a first ~10 employees role: you'll help shape the technical foundation, engineering bar, and execution culture from the ground up, partnering directly with the founders on architecture and hiring.Compensation: $160,000–$220,000 + meaningful early-stage equityTo applyThe first step isn't a resume black hole — it's a conversation. You'll spend about 25–30 minutes with Navii, an AI hiring agent, on your own time: learn about the role, explore the fit, and share what a resume can't — no prep, no wrong answers. The hiring team reviews each conversation directly and reaches out to the candidates they'd like to move forward.(Also a fit if you call yourself: Backend Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, or Systems Engineer.)What you'll doLow-latency serving & decisioning — request handling, ranking, and auction flows that stay fast under real trafficDelivery infrastructure customers can rely on — targeting, pacing, campaign management, and the plumbing that turns decisions into outcomesMeasurement that doesn't lie — attribution, reporting, incrementality, and experimentation systems built for correctness and operational sanityPlatform architecture for performance & reliability — scalability and throughput where latency and correctness are both non-negotiableAI-accelerated engineering — use AI to speed up design, debugging, and iteration while keeping engineering judgment intactWhat you'll needStrong computer science fundamentals, and the ability to turn them into production-grade systemsProven backend + distributed systems experience, especially in high-throughput environmentsExperience building or scaling low-latency, high-QPS systems with real operational ownershipProduction engineering and debugging depth — you protect correctness even when speed is temptingAbility to own a technical component end-to-end, from design through rollout and ongoing reliabilityBonus pointsExperience with ads / monetization infrastructure (serving, auctions, targeting, measurement/attribution)Experience building experimentation or measurement platforms at scale