Lead Full Stack Developer - Startup

Company Description

Founding Teams is an AI Incubator & Talent platform. We are supporting the next generation of AI startup founders with the resources they need including engineering, product, sales, marketing and operations staff to create and launch their product.

The ideal candidate will have a passion for next generation AI tech startups and working with great global startup talent.

Tech Stack:

GCP, Ubuntu Linux, Next.js, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, pgvector, OpenAI Service, GitHub, Nginx, Docker, HTML, Bootstrap, CSS

Required Skills & Experience

Full-Stack Engineering

• 5+ years of professional experience building modern web applications, with strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript , React , and Next.js .
• Solid backend development experience using Node.js or similar frameworks; ability to design, implement, and optimize scalable API endpoints.
• Strong understanding of HTML5 , CSS3 , Bootstrap , Figma based, responsive UI design, and component-driven architecture.
• Skilled at integrating REST/ APIs , Claude(MCP) with strong knowledge of authentication, error handling, and performance optimizations.

Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure

• Hands-on experience deploying and managing applications in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) , especially on Ubuntu Linux VMs .
• Strong proficiency with Docker , including writing production-ready Dockerfiles, managing multi-stage builds, and optimizing images.
• Practical, production-level experience with Kubernetes (GKE preferred), including deployments, services, config maps, secrets, and cluster debugging.
• Experience configuring and optimizing Nginx for routing, reverse proxy setups, SSL/TLS, caching, and serving production frontend builds.
• Strong familiarity with CI/CD pipelines using GitHub (Actions, protected branches, code owners, automated testing).

Data & AI Systems

• Strong knowledge of relational database design and querying with PostgreSQL .
• Familiarity with pgvector , vector embedding workflows, and semantic search integration.
• Experience consuming and integrating Azure OpenAI services (chat completion, embeddings, assistants, vector operations).

Leadership, Collaboration & Code Quality

• Will work closely with the Lead Developer on:
• Code review , enforcing standards, architectural consistency, and best practices.
• Code consolidation , refactoring, and mentoring junior/mid-level engineers.
• Ability to take ownership of complex features from architecture to deployment.
• Ability to meet deployment deadlines.
• Strong understanding of maintainable, scalable design patterns and performance best practices.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and design teams.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with observability tools (Stackdriver, Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry).
• Experience building AI-enhanced or vector-search-driven applications.
• Knowledge of security best practices for cloud-native and frontend applications.