Founding Product Engineer (Full Stack)

About Portal

Portal lets people try real software instantly in a secure, isolated environment.

Behind each link is a live browser session that:

• Starts in a preconfigured state
• Is isolated per viewer
• Resets after exit
• Enforces guardrails
• Streams in real time
• Supports optional AI guidance

Portal is built for products you can't understand unless you try them: DevTools, AI products, complex SaaS, and anything with real state and behavior.

Backed by South Park Commons (SPC F25).

About the Role

We're looking for a founding engineer to own and extend the platform layer behind Portal.

You'll work directly with the founding team on identity, session lifecycle, and the infrastructure that turns a link click into a live, isolated environment, and scale it to the next order of magnitude.

If you're excited by making already-working systems faster, more elegant, and ready for serious scale, this role is likely a strong fit.

What You'll Work On

• Extending our identity & automatic login systems
• Managing the lifecycle of ephemeral sessions
• Optimizing cold start performance and reliability
• Evolving runtime guardrails as new use cases emerge
• Scaling concurrent sessions to the next level
• Building internal tooling and observability
• Building automated evaluations for our AI Agent

You Might Be a Fit If You've

• Built authentication or identity systems
• Worked on multi-tenant backend platforms
• Owned infrastructure in production
• Thought about trust boundaries and security tradeoffs
• Operated distributed systems under load

You enjoy:

• Making systems predictable
• Eliminating edge-case failures
• Thinking about how things break
• Turning complex infrastructure into something simple for users

You don't need to know all of this on day one, but you should be excited by the shape of the problem

.

Why Portal (and Why Now)

• Meaningful equity
• Help define a new way software is experienced
• Rare mix of platform engineering, security, and real-time systems
• Tiny team, high ownership, real users
• Working out of South Park Commons's office in SF or others in SF
• Commute to this job's location.

Compensation

• $110k–$180k salary
• ~1.5–4% equity

What Portal Does

Portal is the official product and company behind makeportals.com.

Portal lets you share any browser state as a link: websites, localhost, Chrome extensions, local files. Recipients open an isolated session and try your product instantly, no install required. They explore freely or an AI guide provides product experiences, and you get rich analytics.

Portal's mission is to make links for every product state on earth, making them reachable and explainable. Trying software shouldn't require installing it & onboarding shouldn't require a screenshot to LLMs.

Portal turns any running product into a shareable session link. Not a video. Not a mockup. Not a walkthrough overlay. The real UI, fully interactive, safe to share.

Key Features

• Share any browser state as a link (websites, localhost, Chrome extensions, local files)
• Recipients get an isolated session with no install or signup required
• AI guide trained on your docs answers questions and can provide product experiences
• Click-level analytics on every interaction
• Guardrails to block destructive actions
• No code required to set up

Use Cases

• Replacing first sales calls with self-serve product experiences
• User research: watch where users hesitate, get stuck, or drop off
• Onboarding: drop users into a configured state with an AI guide
• Sharing Chrome extensions without requiring installs
• Sharing localhost projects as links
• DevRel workshops: everyone opens the same environment instantly

What Portal is NOT

• Not a video
• Not a product mockup
• Not an onboarding overlay
• Not a static walkthrough
• Not automation software
• Portal provides access to a real, running product instance with guardrails.