← back to careers
Founding Engineer
Description
L9 builds products for industries still trapped by old software. We are looking for someone who can take a problem from “this is absurd” to a real company.
The job is straightforward:
- Find an important industry tolerating a terrible product
- Understand why the problem has survived
- Build something meaningfully better
- Convince the first customers to use it
- Repeat
You will operate closer to a founder than a traditional employee. There will not always be a specification, roadmap, or existing team. You will decide what matters, build the first version, put it in front of people, and learn whether you were right.
Likely territory includes telecom, networking, healthcare, aviation, government, education, and enterprise software—the places where painful tools survive because the people buying them are not the people forced to use them.
What you'll do
- Study unfamiliar industries until you understand how the work actually happens
- Find expensive problems everyone else has learned to tolerate
- Talk to users, buyers, and anyone who can explain why the obvious solution does not already exist
- Build prototypes quickly and turn the promising ones into production products
- Help win the first customers
- Make technical, product, and business decisions without waiting for permission
- Recruit the people a new venture needs
- Move between projects as ideas become companies
Good fit
- Exceptional at building things; the medium matters less than the result
- Generate your own direction instead of waiting for a backlog
- Learn complicated industries unusually quickly
- Comfortable writing code, talking to customers, and selling an idea
- Question requirements, defaults, and explanations that do not make sense
- Prefer direct disagreement over polite confusion
- Impatient with meetings, bureaucracy, and performative work
- Have a history of starting things before anyone asked
- Prefer building the right tool over adapting the company to a bad one
- Care about making the world better, but want to do it through useful products rather than slogans
We do not care about credentials, pedigree, or whether your experience looks conventional. Show us what you have built, changed, sold, discovered, or taught yourself.
Benefits
- $450k salary + equity
- Bonus
- Full medical, dental, and vision coverage
- $50 daily food stipend
- $50 daily rideshare stipend
- $500 monthly wellness stipend
- $500 monthly therapy stipend
- $1000 monthly rent stipend
- All public transportation costs covered
- $200 monthly hobbies stipend
- $100 monthly clothing stipend
- Take any stipend as additional salary instead
Interview process
- A 15-minute call to see whether we want to work together
- One 60-minute working session. We will give you a broken product or process and ask you to make it better
No trivia. No take-home project. Use any tools, documentation, software, or AI you want.