{"id":1228188,"url":"https://alion.io/job/tightknit-founding-engineer","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":1764527,"name":"Tightknit","domain":"tightknit.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/tightknit","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":174000,"max_usd":299000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":295},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Slack","optional":false},{"name":"Stripe","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"Canva","optional":true},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":true},{"name":"Cursor","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Linear","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Next.js","optional":true},{"name":"Node JS","optional":true},{"name":"Notion","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Sentry","optional":true},{"name":"Supabase","optional":true},{"name":"Tailwind CSS","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true},{"name":"Vercel","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-11T22:24:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-11","last_verified_at":"2026-09-25T13:55:28Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":14,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":14},"description":"About Tightknit\nTightknit is the community platform built for Slack. We help B2B teams grow engaged communities with events, gamification, SEO, and branded spaces, all with a deep integration into Slack. We believe communities deserve better, and we build alongside the customers, advocates, and partners who use our product.\nEngineering Culture\nAt Tightknit we are committed to only hiring *“Hell yeah!”*s and not “meh”s. We believe an awesome culture is a natural byproduct of an awesome team.\nHere are qualities we strive for:\nExtreme Ownership: Take pride in your work, own features completely, and fix issues even when they fall outside your exact domain.\nStrong Opinions, Weakly Held: We want opinionated people who will push back on plans they disagree with, but who will commit fully once a decision is made.\nThick Skin, Not Thick Skulls: We welcome debate without taking it personally, knowing that critique is a gift.\nBe a Pioneer: You are comfortable buildings systems around you from scratch.\nHustle with Purpose, not Polish: Stay scrappy. Iterate quickly.\nNo Energy Vampires: We have a strict \"We > Me\" mentality and will not tolerate high-blame mentalities, territorial behavior, or oversized egos.\nKaizen (改善): Leave things better than you found them; make incremental improvements.\nUse AI to disrupt yourself: Otherwise your job, or your company, may not exist soon.\nYou should be able to speak to how you value the impact of community (being a member of a community group is a major plus).\nOverview\nHi I’m Stephen, Co-Founder and CTO at Tightknit. We are on a mission to revolutionize online communities with an innovative platform built for trust, engagement, and connection, especially meeting members where they are within an app they already love: Slack. Tightknit powers customer and developer communities for teams like Clay, MotherDuck, Mixpanel, Vanta, Gamma, and Stripe.\nOur vision is to make communities a bastion of genuine human relationship and the OS for every business’s sales & marketing team. And we are hiring our first Founding Engineer to help us build that future!\nAs an early engineer, you will:\nWork directly with the CTO\nDefine architecture, not just implement it\nShape product direction, not just execute it\nOwn systems end-to-end (design → implementation → monitoring → iteration)\nInteract directly with customers\nBuild internal AI workflows to accelerate our velocity\nHelp determine how engineering operates here\nWear many hats and operate independently with high accountability\nThis isn’t just a coding role. It is a seat at the table. In fact, while programming knowledge matters, in the AI age it’s becoming less and less central to our day-to-day work. So who are we really looking for?\nEngineer with taste - Put away the IDE for a moment and put on your PM hat. We trust in your ability to talk to customers, synthesize their asks, and create excellent products with extreme level of thoughtfulness and detail. You hold yourself and your work to a high bar.\nEngineer who can design - You don’t need to be a front-end wizard (although we’d love if you are!), but you have a good eye for distinguishing good vs. bad UX. Don’t expect sloppiness in any area of the stack to be fixed by someone else.\nEngineer who can manage - Everyone now has access to an army of digital employees and the best programmers on earth. Can you effectively use them to multiply yourself and our team? Oh and did we mention, everyone at Tightknit is a community manager! \nWhat We're Looking For\nThis is a staff-level role, so we require at least 5+ years of experience as a full-time full-stack engineer. You must possess strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing production systems.\nExperience at an early-stage startup or working directly with founders is strongly preferred. Experience delivering enterprise products is a bonus.\nSmarter, Better, Faster, Stronger\nWe believe every hire either makes us “smarter” (fills in our weak spots) or “stronger” (adds fuel to our strengths), or both! For this role, we will be honing in especially on candidates whose skills make us smarter.\nHere’s a fun visual of where we think our team’s strengths / preferences currently lie:\nFront-End /⬜Back-End ⬜⬜ /\nInfra/Ops ⬜⬜ /⬜\nAPI⬜ /⬜\nPerf ⬜⬜ /⬜\nSecurity ⬜ /⬜\nDatabase ⬜⬜⬜ /\nHumility ⬜ /⬜\n^us ^you??\n\nTechnology Stack\nYou do not need to know all of these perfectly on day one, but you must be able to learn quickly.\nLanguages & Frameworks: Javascript / Typescript, React, Next.js, TanStack, Node.js, Tailwind\nInfrastructure & Cloud: Cloudflare ecosystem (Workers, KV, Durable Objects, Workflows, Queues), Vercel\nData: PostgresSQL, Drizzle, Supabase\nPlatforms: Slack platform, OpenAPI APIs, and event-driven architectures\nTools: Github, Linear, Slack, OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, Antigravity, Notion, Posthog, Mintlify, Canva, Sentry (suggest something to us!)\nInterview Process\nIntro Call (30 minutes) - get to know each other, brag about how many LLM tokens you use, we demo Tightknit, etc.\nTechnical Screen (1 hour)\nOpen-Ended Technical Exercise (2 hours) - pair programming simulation, open-ended exercises\nFounders Call(s) (30 minutes) - hear our vision, make sure you like us and we like you and you are not a sociopath thank you! \nReach out to References - we may ask you for references, so others may also confirm you are indeed not a sociopath\nCompatibility Check\nSuperDay (typically 1 day) - paid work trial, designed as a mutual compatibility check so you can see what it’s like to work with us (and we can learn what it’s like to work with you). This is a pragmatic test of fit that ensures everyone is genuinely excited about the partnership. It is not designed as a technical test.\nSuperDay\nThe final stage of our process is what we call a SuperDay. This is typically one paid full day of work with us, which we can flexibly arrange around the candidate's schedule. The goal is a mutual compatibility checkso all of us can get a real sense of what it’d be like to work together. The SuperDay may be done remotely or in person if nearby one of our co-working spaces. We are not able to bypass this stage so if the candidate is not interested in doing this final step, unfortunately we will have to part ways and the candidate will no longer be considered for the role.\nWe can be veryflexible with scheduling! For example, we can split the SuperDay into half-days, do it in the evenings, or schedule it on a weekend as needed.The candidate will be working on mock tasks similar to the real-world day-to-day work someone in this role does at Tightknit. They will also have the chance to meet a few of their potential direct team members, and if they haven’t already, our founders. This gives the candidate a chance to show off their skills, and for us to see the quality, speed and communication of the candidate. Overall, the candidate should aim to spend at least 80% of their time and energy on the task and less than 20% on meeting people, as we will base our decision primarily on the output of the day.\nWe pay all candidates a flat rate of $500 USD for their SuperDay efforts. On rare occasions, if we have to cancel a scheduled SuperDay arrangement because we have filled the role with another candidate who was further advanced in the process, we will pay a $250 USD term fee to the candidate for their efforts up until that point. If the candidate is unable to accept payment for the SuperDay, we will donate the amount to an agreed upon charity of their choice.\nAs a part of the SuperDay arrangement, you will be asked to sign an NDA / CLA and may be provided with a mocked and/or siloed codebase.Your First Two Months at Tightknit\nWeek 1-2\nComplete your SuperDay.\nJoin the Slack customer community and see how real users think.\nForm strong opinions about our architecture, product gaps, and velocity constraints.\nRelease a small to medium-sized feature. Improve something meaningful.\nShip production code.\nWeeks 3-4\nOwn a scoped but consequential project end-to-end.\nPropose improvements to our systems (engineering, AI workflows, APIs, performance, etc.).\nStart shaping how engineering should operate here - not just participating in it.\nMonth 2\nLead a cross-cutting initiative (integration, refactor, reliability improvement, new surface area).\nHave direct customer conversations.\nMake at least one architectural decision that meaningfully improves our trajectory.\nBy the end of two months, success looks like this:\nYou’ve taken full ownership of at least one initiative.\nYou’ve earned trust through action and follow-through.\nYou’ve helped us move faster without lowering our standards.\nYou’re clearly operating as a founder-level multiplier - not waiting to be told what to do, but defining what should exist next.\nYou wake up excited to come work alongside this team!\nWhat you might work on\nOur integrations platform which connects into numerous different applications where customer engagement can happen\nOur embedding & retrieval architecture, powering our intelligence layer and unified semantic and keyword search\nOur AI agent for community programming\nBenefits\nCompetitive salary and equity.\n10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Tightknit. Do it when you feel financially comfortable.\nUnlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.\nA minimum of 8 weeks of fully paid parental leave.\nGenerous budget for equipment, software, and ergonomics. Get what you need to be happy and productive!\n$100/month community membership and education budget, with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.\nMembership to a co-working space if you are located in SF or NYC.\nIf you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with Tightknit covering 100% of the premiums. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.\nWe might be a startup, but we do not think that way. Our success hinges on great people and on creating an environment where they can be happy and healthy while feeling challenged to do their best work. We are intentional about the environment we want to create, and we hope this excites you to join us.\nAlso, we love otters here.","description_format":"text","description_chars":10312,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance","Parental leave","Stock options","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Online Forums & Community Platforms"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T13:55:28Z"}],"liveness":{"score":47,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.629,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":20,"reasons":["conf:11","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-09-26T01:41:56Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/tightknit-founding-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/tightknit-founding-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-26T01:41:56Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1666,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3334,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-27T00:00:00Z"}}}