Founding Engineer, Apps

Founding Engineer, Apps

Starch · Founding team · Full-time · Brooklyn

We're hiring our second founding engineer.

Starch is building a platform where anyone can spin up real, working software (CRMs, dashboards, automations, internal tools) by talking to an AI agent. No code, no developer, no infrastructure to wire up. Under the hood, a generic engine that turns intent into a deployed, working tool in minutes. The result is software that used to take a team of engineers, built in minutes by the person who needs it. Real users, real revenue, growing every week.

We're looking for a founding engineer to own the apps surface: the templates, tools, and marketplace experience that users discover, adopt, and live inside every day.

What you'll do

• Own the marketplace end to end. Discovery, listing, adoption flow, in-app onboarding, and the "first five minutes" that decide whether a tool sticks.
• Build flagship app templates. Ship the CRMs, project trackers, dashboards, and automations that show users what the platform can do, and that thousands of them will fork and customize.
• Push the platform to be more expressive. When a template needs something the engine can't yet do, you'll extend the engine with new primitives and new capabilities, so every tool benefits, not just one.
• Sweat the UX. Every flow should feel magical. When a user hits a missing connection or prerequisite, the app should resolve it inline and land them exactly where they were going.
• Work across the whole stack. React and TypeScript on the frontend, Supabase Edge Functions (Deno) and Postgres on the backend, and a growing roster of LLMs in the middle.

What we're looking for

• Strong full stack chops. You're equally comfortable shipping a polished React component and writing the edge function and SQL behind it. TypeScript, React, Postgres, and a serverless backend should all feel native.
• Taste. You have strong opinions about what "good" feels like in software, the difference between a tool that works and a tool people love. You can look at a flow and instantly tell what's wrong with it.
• Speed and shipping bias. You'd rather ship something real today and iterate than spend a week designing the perfect abstraction.
• A platform mindset. You instinctively reach for the generic, reusable solution, and you can tell the difference between "this should be a primitive" and "this is a one-off that doesn't belong."
• Excitement for frontier AI. LLMs, agents, tool use, evals. You want to build with this stuff every day and have real opinions about what's possible now versus six months from now.

Why this role

• You're employee #4. The platform, the company, the culture, you'll shape all of it.
• Frontier work, real users. You're not building a demo. You're building software people run their businesses on, on top of the most capable AI models on the planet.
• Hard, fun problems. AI orchestration, generic data systems, integration sprawl, UX that has to feel effortless on top of arbitrary user-defined schemas. Every week is a new puzzle.
• Founding team upside. Meaningful equity, a seat at the table for product and technical direction, and the kind of resume line that doesn't come around often.