Founding Engineer & Technical Lead

Overview

About thinQit

thinQit is a multi-tenant, AI-native platform that takes a project from raw idea to a working, production-grade web application automatically. It's delivered through a suite of three products Codex, Compass, and Teammates spanning AI code generation with self-fixing QA, intelligent document processing and citation-validated knowledge work, AI-generated presentations, and autonomous AI Teammates that execute real work end to end.
This is not a wrapper around a chat API. It's a deep, agentic system: multi-phase planning and execution agents, multi LLM orchestration across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models, MCP integrations, and 170+ API endpoints behind it all running on production Azure infrastructure, serving real, paying customers today.

The Role
We're hiring our founding engineer and technical lead the senior-most member of engineering and the person who owns this platform end to end: frontend, backend, infrastructure, and the AI agent layer.
You won't be a cog in a team. You'll be the technical backbone. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders to turn vision into architecture, set the engineering bar, and direct a fleet of AI coding agents that you scope, review, and ship with. As the company grows, you'll define how we build, write the standards others follow, and bring up the engineers who join behind you.
You should be the kind of engineer who treats Claude and GPT as force multipliers, not novelties — someone who can drive multiple AI agents in parallel and still hold an uncompromising line on architecture, security, and code quality.

Why This Role
*Founding ownership of something real. Not a greenfield experiment a substantial, production-grade codebase with customers depending on it. Your job is to take it further, faster.

You set the foundation. Architecture, standards, tooling, hiring bar, engineering culture the decisions you make become the ground everyone else builds on.

AI-augmented from day one. You'll ship with a workflow most companies are still only talking about: multiple agents in parallel, human judgment on top.

Direct line to the founders. No layers, no politics. You're in the room for every technical decision that matters.

Equity, autonomy, and impact that scale with the company you help build.*

What You'll Own
*The full thinQit codebase: Next.js 14 (App Router) + React 18/19 + TypeScript web app, the marketing site, and three React Native (Expo) mobile apps.

The AI agent layer: two-phase code-generation agents (planner + executor), self-fixing QA automation, wireframe generation, citation-validation loops, and 90+ document AI operations across OpenAI GPT-5-series, Claude, and Google models.

Multi-LLM orchestration and MCP servers: routing, fallbacks, and the cost/quality/latency tradeoffs that decide which model runs where.

Azure infrastructure: Web Apps, Container Apps, Service Bus, Blob Storage, Key Vault, PostgreSQL deployed via Bicep and Terraform with multi-stage Docker builds.

CI/CD 21 GitHub Actions workflows covering build, test, and deploy.

The data and API layer a 47-table PostgreSQL schema, 173 API endpoints, and the multi-tenant auth and billing layer around them.

Quality 300+ Vitest unit tests and Playwright E2E suites. Keep them green, grow them, and make them mean something.*

Technical Leadership & Direction
This is a lead role, and the leadership is real even before the team is large:
Set the architecture and defend it. Make the hard calls on system design, then document the why so the next engineer inherits reasoning, not just code.

Define how humans and AI agents build together. You're designing the playbook for agent-augmented engineering at thinQit task scoping, review gates, what ships autonomously and what doesn't.

Own the engineering bar. Code review standards, security practices, testing discipline, and the definition of "production-ready" are yours to set and enforce.

Build the team. As we grow, you'll shape the hiring bar, interview and select engineers, and mentor them into the standards you've set.

Be the technical voice in the room with founders, with customers when it counts, and in the tradeoff conversations between speed, cost, and quality.

Day to Day
*Ship across the stack from React UI to Express/Next.js API routes to database migrations to Azure deployment.

Orchestrate multiple AI coding agents in parallel scope tasks, review output, and merge production-grade code fast without dropping the bar.

Design and harden agentic workflows prompt pipelines, tool use, evaluation, and self-correction loops.

Own production monitoring, incidents, performance, and cost optimization across both Azure and LLM spend.

Make architecture calls and document them you're setting decisions others will build on for years.
Raise the team's ceiling through reviews, standards, and the systems that make good work the default.*

The Stack at a Glance
Frontend: Next.js 14 (App Router), React 18/19, TypeScript, React Native (Expo)
Backend: Node.js, Express / Next.js API routes, 173 endpoints
AI: OpenAI (GPT-5-series), Anthropic (Claude), Google multi-LLM orchestration + MCP servers
Data: PostgreSQL (47-table schema), multi-tenant auth & billing
Infra: Azure (Web Apps, Container Apps, Service Bus, Blob Storage, Key Vault), Docker (multi-stage), Bicep + Terraform
CI/CD & QA: 21 GitHub Actions workflows, Vitest (300+ tests), Playwright E2E

What Success Looks Like
First 30 days — You're shipping to production, fluent in the codebase and deployment pipeline, and you've mapped the highest-leverage risks and opportunities across the platform.
First 90 days — You're independently owning major surfaces of the stack, your agent-driven workflow is moving real features end to end, and you've made (and documented) your first foundational architecture decisions.
First 6–12 months — You've measurably raised reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency; the testing and review standards you set are the team default; and you've laid the groundwork — and possibly hired — to scale engineering behind you.

Must-Haves
5+ years full-stack engineering with deep TypeScript, React, and Node.js (Next.js App Router experience strongly preferred).
Production experience building with LLMs OpenAI and/or Anthropic APIs, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, tool use, and evaluation. Beyond demos.
Hands-on AI-assisted development you already use Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, or similar daily and can manage multiple agents at once.
Strong Azure experience App Service / Container Apps, Service Bus, Key Vault, and IaC (Bicep or Terraform).
Docker fluency, including multi-stage builds and container deployment.
PostgreSQL at scale schema design, migrations, query performance.
CI/CD ownership with GitHub Actions or equivalent.
Founder mentality comfortable with ambiguity, ruthless prioritization, and shipping without a safety net.
Ownership and judgment to lead you can hold the technical bar, make decisions others rely on, and bring people up to your standard.

Nice-to-Haves
MCP server development or LLM orchestration frameworks.
React Native / Expo experience.
Multi-tenant SaaS architecture and billing systems (Stripe or similar).
Deep Playwright / Vitest testing practice and security hardening of AI-generated code.
Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small team.

Who You Are
You ship. You'd rather have something real in production than something perfect in a doc.
You hold a high bar under pressure speed doesn't make you sloppy.
You think in systems and tradeoffs, and you can explain your reasoning to a founder or a junior engineer with equal clarity.
You're genuinely excited that AI agents do part of the work and clear-eyed about where human judgment is non-negotiable.
You want the ownership, and you're ready for the accountability that comes with it.