Founding Engineer (Frontend / Mobile)

Location: New York City (Onsite)

Compensation: $200K–$250k base salary + ~1% Equity

About the Opportunity

A venture-backed startup in NYC is hiring a Founding Senior Engineer to help build and scale a rapidly growing consumer mobile product. The team has seen strong early traction, a fast-growing user base, and clear product-market fit—all with an extremely lean engineering team.

This role is ideal for someone who wants to take ownership of a core mobile app experience, work directly with technical leadership, and help define engineering standards, velocity, and culture from day one.

This is an in-person role based in Midtown Manhattan near Bryant Park, working closely with the founding team.

What You’ll Do

• Build major product features end-to-end within a high-quality React Native codebase.
• Collaborate directly with product and design to create intuitive, polished user experiences.
• Implement pixel-perfect interfaces based on Figma designs, with strong attention to detail and fidelity.
• Drive engineering best practices around testing, performance, dev tools, and deployment.
• Contribute to the app’s technical evolution as the product scales and new surfaces emerge.
• Move fast and own outcomes, often taking features from concept to production independently.

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

• Strong background building and shipping consumer-facing applications (mobile or web), with evidence of real ownership—not minor feature edits.
• Deep expertise in React and TypeScript.
• Ability to take high-fidelity designs and translate them into production-ready UI with precision.
• Comfort using AI tools to accelerate development, while still maintaining strong technical judgment and independent thinking.
• Thrives in environments that value speed, quality, and extreme ownership.
• New York–based or willing to relocate — this is an in-office role.

Nice to Have

• Experience with React Native, including performance tuning and native module interactions.
• Familiarity with animation / motion libraries (Rive, Lottie, Reanimated).
• Exposure to behavior-change, wellness, gamification, or AI-driven products.
• Prior role as a founding engineer, early engineer, or technical founder at a startup.
• Backend familiarity (Node, Python, or similar) is a plus.

Why This Role Matters

You’ll be one of the earliest engineers shaping a product with a rapidly expanding user base and significant real-world impact. Your code will directly influence the daily experience of hundreds of thousands of users, and the systems you help build will form the technical foundation for years to come.

This is a rare opportunity to join at the point where traction is real, velocity is high, and engineering decisions still carry enormous influence.