Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer / Technical Lead

KIASA | Remote Worldwide | USD $50–$70/hour

About KIASA

KIASA is an early-stage technology company based in Singapore, building AI-native software and infrastructure.

We are looking for a Founding Engineer / Technical Lead to work directly with the CEO and take meaningful ownership of our technical direction.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will help architect and build the core platform, make key technical decisions, establish engineering practices, and help grow the technical team as the company evolves.

We are looking for someone who wants more ownership than they would typically have in a larger organization and is comfortable building from the ground up.

The position is 100% remote and open to candidates worldwide.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you will be one of KIASA's earliest technical leaders.

You will work across product engineering, backend systems, AI, cloud infrastructure, architecture, and technical strategy.

Early on, you will spend most of your time building.

That means writing production code, designing APIs, developing backend services, integrating AI models, working with databases, deploying infrastructure, debugging issues, and making practical architecture decisions.

As KIASA grows, you will also help shape the engineering organization through hiring, mentoring, architecture reviews, and engineering standards.

We want someone who can lead technically without moving away from hands-on engineering.

What You'll Do

• Architect and build KIASA's core platform from the ground up
• Develop production backend services, APIs, and customer-facing features
• Build AI and LLM-powered product workflows
• Design Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), semantic search, embeddings, and retrieval systems
• Build AI agents, tool-calling workflows, structured outputs, and human-in-the-loop processes
• Design databases, data models, queues, and asynchronous workflows
• Integrate external APIs, models, and third-party platforms
• Build reliable authentication, authorization, and data-access patterns
• Deploy and operate services in AWS, Azure, or similar cloud environments
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD
• Establish monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting
• Improve application performance, reliability, security, and infrastructure cost
• Debug problems across application, AI, data, and infrastructure layers
• Make technology-selection and build-vs-buy decisions
• Review architecture and code
• Work directly with the CEO on technical and product priorities
• Help interview, hire, and mentor future engineers
• Help establish the engineering culture and technical standards of the company

The scope will evolve as KIASA grows. That is intentional.

AI & LLM Engineering

AI is an important part of KIASA's technical direction.

We are especially interested in engineers who understand how to move beyond prototypes and build reliable production systems around modern AI models.

Relevant experience may include OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Amazon Bedrock, open-weight LLMs, RAG, embeddings, semantic and vector search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, AI agents, tool/function calling, structured generation, prompt and context engineering, model routing, evaluation, guardrails, caching, observability, and latency or cost optimization.

You do not need to be an ML researcher.

We care more about whether you can turn AI capabilities into useful, dependable production software.

Backend & Platform Engineering

Strong software engineering fundamentals are essential.

We are interested in engineers with experience in Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Java, or similar backend languages, along with technologies such as FastAPI, REST APIs, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, caching, microservices, distributed systems, and modern frontend frameworks such as React or Next.js.

You do not need to match every technology perfectly.

Strong engineering judgment and the ability to learn quickly matter more than experience with an exact framework.

Cloud & Infrastructure

You should be comfortable deploying and operating the systems you build.

Relevant experience may include AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, managed databases, object storage, queues, monitoring, distributed tracing, identity management, networking, and secrets management.

Experience with services such as EKS, ECS, EC2, S3, RDS, SQS, Bedrock, AKS, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Key Vault, or similar technologies is useful.

We do not expect you to know every cloud service.

We care about whether you understand scalability, reliability, security, performance, observability, and cost well enough to make practical engineering decisions.

What We're Looking For

A strong candidate will typically have significant professional software engineering experience and a track record of building production systems.

You should be comfortable owning problems rather than only implementing predefined tickets.

We value experience with backend architecture, APIs, databases, distributed systems, AI/LLM applications, cloud infrastructure, deployment, observability, system reliability, and technical decision-making.

Experience as a Senior, Staff, Principal, Lead, Founding, or early-stage startup engineer can be especially relevant.

Previous startup experience is helpful, but not required.

Engineers coming from larger technology companies can also be a strong fit if they genuinely want broader ownership and are comfortable operating without a large support organization.

What Matters Most

We are not looking for someone who simply has a long list of technologies on their resume.

We want someone who can take an ambiguous problem, understand what needs to be built, make sensible technical decisions, implement the solution, deploy it, and improve it based on real usage.

You should know when a system needs a strong long-term foundation and when an early-stage company needs a simpler solution to reach the next milestone.

You care about engineering quality, but you do not confuse complexity with sophistication.

You can move quickly without being careless.

When something breaks, you are comfortable going deep enough to understand why.

Technical Leadership

You will help establish how engineering works at KIASA.

That includes contributing to architecture principles, development workflows, code quality, testing, infrastructure, deployment, security, observability, documentation, and future technical hiring.

As the team grows, you may help recruit and onboard engineers, mentor team members, review designs, and lead larger technical initiatives.

The right person should be capable of growing into a broader engineering leadership role while remaining technically strong and hands-on.

Why KIASA

Founding-level ownership. You will join early enough to influence the product, architecture, technical strategy, and future engineering organization.

Direct access to the CEO. You will work directly with company leadership rather than through several layers of management.

Build from the beginning. You will help create the technical foundation rather than inherit years of legacy architecture.

AI-native development. We are building around modern AI capabilities from the beginning rather than adding AI as an afterthought.

Global remote environment. KIASA is headquartered in Singapore, but this role is open to qualified candidates worldwide.

Opportunity to grow. As the company and engineering organization grow, the scope and influence of this role can grow with them.

Compensation

USD $50–$70 per hour, depending on experience, technical depth, responsibilities, and overall fit.

Because we hire internationally, the engagement structure may vary depending on the candidate's location and applicable requirements.

Location

100% Remote | Worldwide

KIASA is based in Singapore. Candidates may work from anywhere in the world but should be comfortable collaborating with a distributed team across time zones.

Any required overlap with Singapore business hours will be discussed during the interview process.

Hiring Process

Our interview process focuses on practical engineering ability and how you approach real technical problems.

We will discuss your previous work, systems you have personally built or owned, architecture decisions and tradeoffs, backend and cloud engineering, AI/LLM experience where relevant, and how you operate in an ambiguous early-stage environment.

A practical technical discussion or coding exercise may also be included.

We will communicate the interview process clearly before each stage.

How to Apply

Please apply with your resume or LinkedIn profile.

GitHub, open-source work, a technical portfolio, or examples of products and systems you have built are welcome but not required.

We would especially like to hear about one product, platform, or technical system you personally helped take from idea to production and what you owned.

If you are a hands-on engineer looking for genuine technical ownership and the opportunity to help build both a product and an engineering organization from an early stage, we'd like to hear from you.