Founding Staff Engineer
- Role
- Backend
- Experience
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Company size
- Startup
Open to Anywhere in Americas. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Founding Staff Engineer with production LLM experience and infrastructure ownership. Must have designed, shipped, and owned production systems end-to-end, preferably in a startup. Reddit nativeness is a huge plus.
Core skills
Required skills
Optional skills
Required languages
Hi! I'm MJ, the founder and CEO of Outpost. Thanks for checking us out.
ABOUT OUTPOST
Outpost is an AI-native marketing company focused entirely on Reddit. We make brands the most recommended name in the communities where their buyers decide what to buy. And because Google ranks Reddit near the top of search and AI answers cite it more than any other source, that recommendation carries into Google and ChatGPT too.
Reddit has quietly become one of the most trusted places on the internet. Before people buy almost anything today, they go to Reddit for honest, unfiltered opinions from real people. Google alone pays $60M a year to train on those conversations. Most brands know all of this and still cannot operate there. The culture intimidates them, every subreddit has its own rules, and marketing that hides gets punished.
We take the opposite approach. Everything we do is white-hat and fully in the open. We represent a brand as itself, or as a named member of its team, and we earn attention by being genuinely useful in the conversations that matter. No fake accounts and no pretending to be someone we are not.
Our work for a client comes in two halves: First, we join the conversations already happening across their space. Second, we build the brand a home of its own, a subreddit we set up, grow and run until it becomes their community. Our platform does the monitoring, prioritization, drafting and measurement behind both. People make the final call on everything that posts.
THE ROLE
You will be our first full-time engineer working on Outpost's product. The product has two goals.
- First, it supports our delivery. As an agency, every hour a person spends on a client is a real cost, and the product aims to reduce it. It surfaces only the threads worth acting on, learns a subreddit's culture and drafts in the brand's voice. It includes quality checks before anything goes live and provides operational tooling for marketers running the accounts. Every bit of leverage you build here improves our margin and increases how many clients one person can handle.
- Second, it is the product our customers use directly. Today customers see only reporting, but they should see the entire channel: what buyers are saying about them, where they stand against competitors, which threads moved their search positions and AI citations, and what to do next. This is the piece that turns an agency into a company with a product.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Staff-level full stack engineering. You have designed, shipped and owned production systems end to end; preferably in an startup environment.
- Production LLM experience, not demos. You know evals, retries, cost and latency in practice.
- Infrastructure ownership. Cloud, data and deploys are yours. There is no platform or infra team.
- Reddit nativeness is a huge plus. Years as an active Redditor, communities you have moderated or grown, anything you have built on the Reddit API. Not a requirement, but it shortens your ramp more than anything else on this list.
Compensation: $72,000 – $150,000 USD per year, plus 0.5% to 2% equity vesting over four years with a one year cliff.
The cash range is wide because the role is open across the Americas and the cost of living is not. What moves you within it is your experience, your local market and how much of this you carry on your own. The equity moves against the cash: take less cash and you take more of the company, up to 2%, which is the top of the normal band for a first engineer.
This is a full-time independent contractor arrangement, a 1099 if you are in the US and a straightforward contractor agreement if you are not. No health benefits. We already pay contractors across borders in their own currency, so getting you paid is solved wherever you are. It is early, it is small, and you will feel every decision you make.
Location: Fully remote, anywhere in the Americas. Canada, the US, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, South America: all equally fine, and we have no preference between them.
Timeline: the start date is somewhere between October 15 and November 15, 2026.
What you'll do
- Design, ship, and own production systems end to end.
- Manage cloud, data, and deploys as there is no platform or infra team.
- Support the delivery of services by reducing the time spent by people on clients.
- Surface threads worth acting on, learn subreddit culture, and draft in the brand's voice.
- Implement quality checks before anything goes live and provide operational tooling for marketers.
- Develop the customer-facing product, starting with reporting and expanding to cover the entire channel of buyer conversations, competitor standing, search positions, AI citations, and actionable insights.
- Turn the agency into a company with a product.
What they require
- Staff-level full stack engineering.
- Designed, shipped and owned production systems end to end; preferably in an startup environment.
- Production LLM experience, not demos. You know evals, retries, cost and latency in practice.
- Infrastructure ownership. Cloud, data and deploys are yours. There is no platform or infra team.
- Years as an active Redditor, communities you have moderated or grown, anything you have built on the Reddit API.
Benefits
- 0.5% – 2% equity vesting over four years with a one year cliff.
- Contractor agreement if not in the US.
- Payment across borders in their own currency.
Outpost is building the backbone of freight, reinventing supply chain infrastructure in America with carrier agnostic truck terminals. It is a vertically integrated real estate, operations, and technology company that acquires and operates mission-critical real estate across the country to serve large logistics providers.