Founding Backend Engineer

About the role

Rendezvu is where athletes recommend the gear they actually use and brands run ambassador programs on the back of it. Every recommendation, click, and sale flows through a backend that reconciles product catalogs, affiliate networks, Shopify stores, and payouts into one truthful picture.

This is a founding engineering seat. You would be the second technical person on the team, working directly with the founder. You will set the standards the rest of the engineering team inherits, and you will ship to production in your first week.

We build with AI, not around it. Claude, Codex, and Cursor are part of the daily loop, and the product itself exposes an assistant and an MCP server to brands. You should be the kind of engineer who reads the model release notes the day they land and has an opinion about them.

What you will do

• Design and run the product data layer: catalog ingestion, variants, pricing, availability, and the matching that ties a host recommendation to the right product across networks.
• Own attribution and commissions end to end, from click event to affiliate network report to host payout, including the bot filtering that keeps the numbers honest.
• Build the AI surface: tool-using agents, the MCP server brands connect to, retrieval over our own data, and the evals that tell us when a model change made things worse.
• Keep a Node, TypeScript, Postgres, and Redis stack fast, observable, and cheap as volume grows.
• Make judgment calls on scope with the founder, then ship them. There is no product manager between you and the customer.

You might be a fit if

• You have shipped and owned production backend systems: the data model, the reliability, and the bill.
• You have worked with e-commerce product data and know why it is harder than it looks: feeds that lie, variants that drift, prices that change under you.
• You use Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex as a core part of how you build, and you follow what Anthropic and OpenAI ship closely enough to know what changed last month.
• You have built products on top of large language models: tool use, agents, MCP, retrieval, or evaluation harnesses.
• You want the responsibility of a founding role and the ambiguity that comes with it.

Nice to have

• You have founded a company, even one that failed. Founders who have been through it understand what this seat is.
• You have built a company or product from zero with a small team.
• You have integrated with affiliate networks (AvantLink, Impact, Rakuten) or the Shopify Admin API.
• You run, ride, climb, or otherwise live in the outdoors our hosts recommend gear for.

How we hire

Apply below with a cover letter. Hunter reads it himself and replies to everyone. If it is a match, the next step is one conversation with the founder, then a short piece of real work together. The whole process runs in about two weeks.

Apply