Founding Software Engineer ($150,000 - $190,000 + Equity)

MOOV is an education technology company building a student movement operating system to make schools safer and more seamless. The Founding Software Engineer will primarily own backend systems, including SIS integrations, event ingestion pipelines, device provisioning, and fleet health, while contributing to front-end work and applying AI effectively. The role involves shipping quickly, debugging complex production issues, and helping establish engineering practices in a young organization.

What you'll do:

• Own backend surfaces outright. The SIS integration layer, the event pipeline, or device provisioning and fleet health. Yours end to end, not yours to assist on. By month three Kevin should not be reviewing your work line by line, because he doesn't need to
• Make the tap path fast and correct at real school-day volume, with roster data as it actually arrives: duplicate IDs, three date formats in one file, a district that renamed every room over the summer. The messy rows are not an edge case. They are the job
• Keep the fleet honest. Readers, kiosks, and handhelds sit in buildings, on networks we didn't configure, 2,500 miles away. You'll care about what a device does when the Wi-Fi drops for six hours, and you'll be able to tell the difference between a firmware problem, a network problem, and a school that moved the Reader
• Be further out on AI than Kevin is , and he is already out there. We want the person who shows up with the thing he hasn't seen yet: a better harness, an agent setup that actually holds up against a real codebase instead of a demo. If your answer to "what's changed in the last month" is what everyone else's answer is, you're not the hire
• And be able to do all of it with the tools switched off. AI is how fast you go. It is not how you think. We will sit you in front of an unfamiliar system with no assistance and expect you to read it, find the thing that's wrong, and write the correct fix. Anyone who can only operate through a model is a liability here

What they're looking for:

• 1-3 years shipping software professionally, or a shorter track record with unusually strong evidence of finished things in front of real users. Side projects count. Coursework doesn't
• You're high agency
• You take accountability
• You debug as a discipline: form a hypothesis, test it. You don't change things until it works and then move on
• You're obsessively curious
• You scope before you execute
• Your questions have specifics in them
• You use AI as leverage and own the output
• You're confident without needing to win
• When a problem repeats, you build the fix instead of getting faster at the answer
• You're legible to people who don't write code
• You're credible in a school building

Benefits:

• Equity: 0.30% - 0.50%
• Early-exercise stock options for tax benefits
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Lunch every day, and dinner if you're here late
• Daily commuter stipend; school and conference travel covered
• Unlimited PTO
• Access to whatever tools you need, plus a monthly book budget
• Relocation stipend if you're moving to New York for this