Job Description

Role Description This is a founding-engineer seat, not a feature-team job. You'll be the engineer behind a production full-stack platform the business relies on every month - backend, frontend, database, infrastructure, and third-party integrations. There's no platform team behind you: you deploy it, you monitor it, you fix it when it breaks, and you decide what gets built next by sitting with the people who use it. With modern AI tooling, we expect one exceptional engineer to

operate at the pace of a small team, and we'll equip you accordingly.

Because you'll be the primary owner, you should be genuinely comfortable across the entire stack, and comfortable being the last line of defense for a production system that holds sensitive business data.

The Technical Bar

Concretely, you should be able to:
• Own a Java / Spring Boot backend end to end - API design, data modeling, transactions, performance, and security.
• Ship polished, complex UIs in React without a designer holding your hand.
• Run PostgreSQL yourself: schema design, migrations, query tuning, and backups.
• Operate real infrastructure: Docker, Linux VMs, reverse proxies, CI/CD, logs, and monitoring - and you've been on the hook when something went down.
• Integrate with messy third-party APIs and make the result reliable.
• Bonus: data engineering (Airflow, Trino/Iceberg, or similar), messaging

(JMS/ActiveMQ), and building with LLMs as a force multiplier.

Who You Are:
• 6+ years building full-stack systems, including at least one stretch where you shipped something end to end alone or on a very small team - a startup, a founding-engineer role, or a product with real users that was truly yours. Big-tech experience is valuable, but

on its own it may not translate: this role has none of that scaffolding.
• A builder first. You'd rather own the whole problem than a slice of it.
• Excellent technical judgment - you can weigh a tradeoff, see its business implications, and make the call without a committee.
• Strong stakeholder instincts. You can sit with a non-technical user, understand what they actually need, and ship it quickly.
• Comfortable owning production end to end - security, data integrity, and uptime are yours.
• Adaptable and ambitious. As RangeWater grows, you grow into the technical leader who builds the team around this platform.

You may be a good fit if you
• Ship. You've built things start to finish - full stack, real users, no safety net

Have run production on your own - deployed it, monitored it, resolved incidents, and made sure they didn't recur.
• Like iterating with users. You'd rather sit with the person who has the problem than guess at it from your desk.
• Get hooked on new problems. Dropping into a business you've never seen, learning how it really works, and building the thing that fixes it sounds like a good week.
• Want to transform businesses with AI. You're driven to figure out how AI can reshape the way a company operates - and you already use it to multiply your own output.
• Have taste. You know the difference between code that runs and a product that lands.
• Treat a blank page as a starting line, not a wall.

What You Will Own (first year)

The entire platform: backend services, the React app, the database, deployment, and uptime.
• Hardening it - security, data integrity, tests, and documentation worthy of a system the business depends on.
• Shipping the stakeholder backlog at startup pace.
• Laying the technical foundation - and eventually the team - for what comes next.