Founding Senior Software Engineer

About Highline

Highline is building an AI-native platform for the power services industry. We’ve raised $100 million in a seed round to acquire service providers for the power ecosystem and replatform them on to an AI-native operating system that automates workflows and transforms customer delivery. As a result, not only do we own the technical infrastructure, but we also own the underlying company and data, oversee effective adoption, and benefit from the value creation enabled by technological innovation.

We're backed by Energy Impact Partners, Elad Gil, 8VC, and Saga Ventures. Unlike private equity, Highline is a permanent capital vehicle with an extremely long-term view. Our approach is grounded with real operating businesses, customers, and workflows, not just software in search of a problem.

Our first build is an AI-native power procurement advisory firm. Over time, we’ll expand into four power services verticals representing $80 Billion TAM. This is an opportunity to join Highline at the ground floor and define the technological roadmap.

The role

We’re looking for a senior software engineering hire to work directly with our Head of Engineering and founding team. This is a hands-on founding role with substantial ownership over the product, architecture, hiring, and engineering culture.

You’ll own the platform end-to-end, from database schema design through production deployment. The role is backend-leaning, but not confined to a layer of the stack. You should be comfortable building the UI, integrating an external system, or debugging infrastructure.

The role requires a high degree of flexibility and autonomy. You’ll work with customers to turn ambiguous business problems into technical solutions. As the engineering org scales, you will be responsible for enforcing best practices to maintain a high technical bar.

We want someone who can build and iterate quickly from zero to one, but who understands engineering fundamentals and has experience working with production, mission critical systems where bugs and downtime can be catastrophic.

What you’ll do

• Own workflows end to end. Work with energy advisors and operators to turn messy, partially documented processes into useful software. Scope the smallest valuable release, ship it, and improve it based on real usage.
• Build the core platform. Design data models, APIs, background jobs, and integrations that support customers, utility accounts, usage data, supplier pricing, and procurement workflows.
• Put AI into production. Build document extraction and agent-driven workflows with validation, evaluation, human-gated reviews.
• Own reliability and security. Establish practical testing, observability, access controls, and deployment practices. Debug production issues and address their underlying causes.
• Build for reusability. Start with a concrete workflow, then evolve the system so additional businesses can use it without maintaining separate implementations.
• Shape the engineering team. Set a high bar for code review, technical decisions, and ownership, and help interview, onboard, and manage future hires.

What we’re looking for

• A track record of taking products from zero to one and owning them in production with real users, including mission-critical systems where correctness and reliability matter.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals: data modeling, APIs, databases, asynchronous processing, and the failure modes of systems that depend on external services.
• Experience growing a codebase while keeping it understandable, testable, and safe to change, and establishing engineering practices that hold up as a team grows.
• A hands-on approach to leadership. You can own substantial implementation work while giving other engineers the context, support, and autonomy to own theirs.
• The ability to turn ambiguous problems into achievable plans, set priorities, and coordinate work across a small team without creating unnecessary process.
• Sound hiring judgment and a willingness to help build the team: evaluating candidates, onboarding new engineers, and setting a high bar for technical depth and ownership.
• Product judgment and clear communication. You can work directly with nontechnical experts, challenge assumptions constructively, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Effective use of AI development tools, paired with the ability to review, debug, and verify everything you ship—and hold the team to the same standard.
• Experience with LLM-powered applications, document processing, enterprise integrations, or workflow automation is a plus. Energy industry experience is not required.

Our stack

We are still in early stages so the stack is flexible and will almost definitely adapt over time. Our current stack includes Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL via Neon, React, and TypeScript, with LangGraph and Anthropic/OpenAI APIs for AI workflows. We use modern cloud infrastructure, automated testing, and AI-assisted development tools.

Experience with these tools is definitely not required! We care more about your fundamentals, judgment, and ability to choose the right approach for the problem.

Why Highline

• Genuine zero-to-one ownership: Shape the product, architecture, and engineering culture. Work directly with the Founders to build and lead the team while staying hands-on.
• Own the build-versus-buy decisions: Choose what we build in-house, what we buy, and how it all fits together. You’ll have authority to select vendors, adopt existing software, and integrate tools into our platform and customer solutions.
• Operating real businesses: Our acquired businesses bring established customers, and real workflows. Focus on solving their hardest problems instead of being a vendor selling a Saas product.
• AI with real impact: Help power the next era of American innovation. Build AI-powered software to modernize power services as energy availability becomes a critical bottleneck to technological progress and economic growth.
• Senior Founding engineer equity: Gain equity in an early stage, high-growth business at its foundation.
• Entrepreneurial environment: meaningful exposure and training on all aspects of running an early stage technology org. Meet with VCs, negotiate with frontier AI labs and technology partners, and participate in decisions across hiring, product strategy, and business operations.

Interview process

At this stage, our interview process is flexible and conversation dependent. We will most likely have several conversations to assess compatibility and technical depth. That will most likely look like a project deep dive, a solution design interview, and an in-person working session. There will not be a coding challenge.