Founding Engineer

About Petrarch

Petrarch is a next generation data company. We research internal company data for frontier labs, with a targeted focus on industrial and manufacturing firms. We rigorously redact sensitive information and build long-term research partnerships. We identify gaps in today’s frontier models so that tomorrow’s agents can bolster the backbone of the industrial economy. We are an extremely fast-moving and close-knit team.

About the role
We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to own the development and deployment of Petrarch’s front-facing application. You’ll work across the stack, from frontend experiences and backend services to data ingestion and processing, and deploy Petrarch’s Lindo service directly into customer cloud environments, serving as the technical owner for getting customers up and running.

What you’ll do

• Build and ship customer-facing features across the frontend and backend.
• Own data ingestion and processing/de-identification pipelines, ensuring customer data is reliably identified, transformed, and made available to the application.
• Deploy and operate Petrarch’s Lindo platform within customer cloud environments
• Own technical implementation for new customers, from initial architecture and configuration through production deployment.
• Integrate with customer infrastructure, including authentication, identity, databases, APIs, storage, networking, and other enterprise systems.
• Debug issues across the entire stack and take ownership of problems through resolution.
• Improve deployment tooling, observability, testing, reliability, and automation as we scale.
• Work directly with customers to understand technical requirements and turn them into product and infrastructure improvements.
• Help define engineering standards and architecture as an early member of the engineering team.

What we’re looking for

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production software.
• Experience building modern full-stack applications. We care more about your ability to work across the stack than experience with any particular framework.
• Strong backend development experience, including APIs, databases, distributed systems, and data processing.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and deploying production applications on AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
• Familiarity with containers, Docker, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and modern deployment practices.
• Comfortable working with customer data and building robust ingestion and transformation systems.
• Able to navigate unfamiliar infrastructure and debug problems across application, data, networking, and cloud layers.
• Comfortable working directly with technical customer teams.
• High degree of ownership - you can take an ambiguous problem from “we need this to work” to a reliable production deployment.

Nice to have

• Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, founding engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role.
• Experience deploying software into enterprise VPCs/VNets or customer-managed cloud accounts.
• Experience with SSO/SAML/OIDC, RBAC, enterprise security, and identity systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Experience building high-volume data ingestion or ETL/ELT systems.
• Experience at an early-stage startup where you’ve had to own systems end-to-end.

**Role details
** Type: Full-time
Team: Engineering
Experience: We care more about demonstrated ability & collaboration fit rather than years of experience
Hours: Full-time, with flexibility when customer deployments require coordination
Location: On-Site