Founding Engineer

About Frontier

Frontier is a subsidiary of Fresh Prints. Fresh Prints is a New York-based, fast-growing, fully remote, 150-person company with most of our team based in India and the Philippines. A few years ago, Fresh Prints began helping other fast-growing companies build their teams. We got so good at it that we spun out a new company to focus exclusively on that — and called it Frontier.

At Frontier, we help companies grow full-time, cross-functional teams abroad. We hire the smartest people and place them into the best companies. In three years, we’ve never lost a client. If you’re interested in a Frontier role and you apply and are accepted, we’ll screen you through a couple of internal interviews and aim to get you an interview for a full-time job within the month.

Think of us as your personal talent agent — and good luck with the application! 😊

The Role: Founding Engineer

Your mandate is to build the core systems, advanced backend products, and engineering culture that let Frontier scale our leading enterprise automation and workflows.

This means owning complex production systems, optimizing internal operational tooling, building agent-powered workflows, and creating the structural harnesses that let engineers and operators ship software quickly and safely with AI.

You will work directly with our leadership team and senior operators on the company’s highest-leverage engineering problems: end-to-end data processing speed, high-concurrency search quality, operator productivity, platform onboarding, client intelligence, and AI-assisted operations.

We are only interested in someone who takes a long-term ownership mentality to technical architecture, infrastructure stability, and core business partnerships.

Existing Tech Stack

• Backend: Python (Django and FastAPI frameworks)

• Database: PostgreSQL Database and associated ORM frameworks

• Infrastructure: AWS Services and/or Railway cloud architectures

• AI/Agentic Interface: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Model Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, custom scripts, evaluation frameworks, and real-time observability pipelines

Key Responsibilities

• AI Function Leadership: Build and lead an AI-native engineering function with clear standards, fast shipping, and strong production discipline.

• Core Infrastructure Improvement: Improve our core distributed systems, backend architectures, data ingestion layers, search, quoting, data management, payments, reporting, and internal copilots.

• Agentic Harness Design: Design the harnesses that make agentic engineering reliable: repo instructions, skills, MCP tools, scripts, hooks, CI gates, evals, observability, permissions, and review loops.

• Development Interface Execution: Use Claude Code, Codex, and related tools as a primary development interface, not an occasional assistant.

• Non-Engineer Contribution Paths: Create a safe contribution path for non-engineers using AI tools, with rigorous engineering review loops at the right friction points.

• Operational Systems Transformation: Turn messy, ambiguous operational constraints into simple, durable systems.

• Team Development: Recruit, coach, and raise the engineering bar for a lean, elite engineering team.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with growth, sales, operations, and finance to ship software that improves company revenue, margin, speed, and customer experience.

Qualifications

• Hacker Mindset: You are a hacker in all aspects of life.

• Full-Stack Depth: You are a strong full-stack engineer with a heavy backend bias.

• Production Ownership: You have owned complex production systems that real customers or business operators depend on daily.

• Startup DNA: You have experience with early-stage, high-growth tech environments, operating within lean and efficient teams.

• Leadership Capabilities: You have strong leadership skills with experience in building, mentoring, and managing high-performing engineering teams or technical pods.

• Agent Expert: You use coding agents every day and thoroughly understand their strengths, limitations, and failure modes from hands-on experience.

• Interface Power-User: You frequently hit usage limits on Claude, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools because you actively push them to execute real-world production code.

• Concrete Portfolio: You have taken ultimate ownership and responsibility for an existing product or system before and possess a portfolio, GitHub repo, Loom, write-up, or concrete example of an application you built from scratch.

• Language Proficiency: You have strong proficiency with Python, PostgreSQL, and associated ORM frameworks (specifically Django and FastAPI).

• Ambiguity Decomposer: You know how to cleanly decompose ambiguous work into technical specs, discrete tasks, automated tests, evals, and reviewable artifacts.

• Innovative Thinker: You are a creative thinker with the ability to identify innovative growth opportunities and experiment with new approaches.

• Agent Failure Detection: You can tell when a generative agent is solving the wrong problem, overfitting to a test, hallucinating confidence, or making the codebase harder to maintain long-term.

• Verification Disciplined: You care deeply about verification: tests, logs, traces, screenshots, PR reviews, evals, and hard evidence over subjective vibes.

• Strategic Judgment: You have strong product judgment and can navigate smoothly from a business bottleneck to a clean technical design without needing everything pre-specified.

• Disciplined Velocity: You move quickly, but you do not confuse speed with mess. You can lead people, set team standards, give direct feedback, and build a team that gets stronger over time.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience building internal productivity tools, CRM custom engines, or dashboard tools for operations-heavy business segments.

• Advanced knowledge of high-volume data scraping, browser automation, data parsing, or complex third-party API integrations.

• Experience with communications automation, Slack, WhatsApp, HubSpot, payment gateways, workflow orchestration, or data-heavy analytical dashboards.

• You have built your own technical product from scratch before that has generated meaningful revenue ($100k+) or active consumer usage (100k+ users).

• You have previously co-founded or started your own company.

• Experience setting up AI guardrails at an organizational level: code review policies for AI-assisted contributions, IP and data-handling practices, secrets/access controls, model and tool selection, and evaluation frameworks.

What’s Offered

• High-Impact Ownership: Own the infrastructure for an established company with real product-market fit, high-profile customers, fast scaling, and a clear operational problem worth solving.

• Capital Stability: We have been profitable many more of our years than not, and all of our organizational design and capital allocation are about being one of the most consequential companies for human flourishing over the coming decades, rather than near-term fundraising cycles.

• Immediate Leverage Work: Work on a clear operational ecosystem where optimized software immediately improves customer experience, margins, unit economics, and team capacity.

• Executive Access: Work directly with the company's cofounders, most senior executive leadership, and operators who treat AI-native systems as a core foundation of how the company runs.

• Work Smarter Culture: We are big believers in always seeking to work smarter rather than working harder, ensuring our incentives align with excellent work/life balance.

• Elite Mentorship: Have regular access to two advisors who are world-class startup founders/CTOs, who together have written most of the software behind funds managing over $15B, who would be excited to provide mentorship and give advice regularly.

• Velocity Values: Grow with a team that values speed, standalone ownership, direct feedback, and practical systems that make customers' lives better.

• Career Trajectory: Have many opportunities for personal, career, and compensation growth.

• Shift Schedule: You will be working in US/EST shift timings.