Founding Engineer

Moonshot is hiring its third engineer — the founding engineer. The metaphor the team uses: the founders are in the jungle with a machete cutting the path; they need someone to lay the bricks and go deeper — fine-tuning the changes they push, owning surfaces end to end, and acting as a genuine third brain who thoughtfully pushes back on product direction. It's primarily front-end/product on the iOS app (real design taste is a big plus), but a true builder who problem-solves independently: when transcript quality drops because the phone is in a pocket, they're the person who thinks through mouth-to-phone distance, investigates LiDAR, and comes back with a solution — unprompted.

The bar is initiative under ambiguity above all else. On a team this small the spec often doesn't exist yet, and every recent miss was an initiative problem, not a skill problem — so the process ends in a paid multi-day trial on real work with deliberate gaps in the brief. The two features that anchor everything: Reminders and sectionalized Notes. Ramp: month 1 — code in users' hands week one, one surface owned end to end, one thing fixed nobody assigned; month 3 — owns one number (the understanding engine's eval score, checkable via the real harness); month 6 — has visibly moved signups or retention, makes product calls in their area without a founder in the room, and helps interview the next hire.

What You'll Own

• The iOS product surface (Swift, iOS 26, on-device foundation models) — primarily front-end/product, end to end
• The two core features: Reminders and sectionalized Notes
• Independent problem-solving on real product issues (e.g., transcript-quality/hardware problems) — figure it out, don't wait to be told
• One measurable number (the understanding engine's evaluation score) by month 3
• Real product decisions in their area; being a third brain that pushes back on direction
• Fixing things adjacent to the task; reporting back "what you did, what the number did, what you'd change"

Requirements

• Proof of finished, self-driven work — a GitHub with real projects that shipped and got used (not tutorials, not ten abandoned starts). Code quality is read first — an agent reads the repos; judgment lands on the codebase, not the profile.
• Initiative under ambiguity — sees what needs doing, owns it, does it, reports back without waiting for a ticket
• Velocity that survives a real codebase — working Swift landed inside the first days, with or without prior iOS
• At least one shipped native mobile thing as evidence; iOS/on-device ML are tie-breaking nice-to-haves, not gates
• Uses AI agents well — shapes/edits what the tools produce rather than pasting; comfortable with agent-built projects

Execution and Ownership

• A relentless executor with product taste and hacker energy; perfectionist only where trust demands it (privacy architecture, validators), fast everywhere else
• "Wrong by Wednesday over vague all month"
• Goes past the ask unprompted; flags a wrong instruction before running it; comes back with what happened + what they'd change
• Willing to grow into the wearable product area (not a one-lane specialist)

Background

• 1–2 years, explicitly not 5 (five is long enough to get siloed); pre-PMF, so "hire for IQ" — raw building ability with proof outranks everything
• School/company pedigree is a weak tie-breaker; education mostly noise
• Ranking: GitHub/projects → product taste → technical experience → consumer/mobile → startup → prior companies → progression → education → years

Backgrounds That Don't Translate (screen out)

• Big-company engineers who've only worked inside tickets/sprints/review queues (the habits, not the skill)
• Pure ML researchers with no shipped product (model work is measured inside a consumer app, not papers)
• Hackathon-only portfolios (prove starting, not finishing)
• Agency/outsourcing work (trains building to spec; this role has no spec)
• Behavioral: best work was assigned to them; serial starters with no finishes

Who Will Thrive Here

• A builder who's already shipped things nobody asked them to ship, and comes back with what happened, not a status update
• A relentless executor with product taste who thrives when the brief has gaps
• Dangerous in Swift fast; happy owning a surface and a number end to end
• Excited by proactive, on-device personal intelligence — and the wearable future
• Takes the work personally