Founding Engineer · First Engineering Hire

OWN THE
PLATFORM.
BUILD THE
FUTURE.

Ironbooks builds AI-powered bookkeeping for trades contractors. The founder built the entire platform with AI coding tools — and it works. Now we need our first engineer to own it, harden it, and scale it from ~90 production clients to 1,000 and beyond.

Base Salary

$150K–$190K

Equity

Up to 2%

Clients on Platform

~90 Live

Market

300K+ Contractors

Learn More

The Work

WHAT YOU'LL BUILD

Books Accuracy Engine

Take the verification score from shadow mode to enforced. No statement ships below the bar. Every number on every client's books is provably right.

Plaid Bank Layer

Direct bank and card connections. Reconcile against actual bank truth in near real time. This is greenfield — yours to design from scratch.

Scale to 1,000+ Clients

Nightly jobs that touch 1,000 QuickBooks files, chunked and checkpointed. Rate-limit-aware, idempotent, resumable. Built for serverless time ceilings.

Safety Net

Tests on every money path. Staging environment. Real migration pipeline. Monitoring that catches silent failures in minutes, not days.

Be Straight With You

WHAT YOU'RE INHERITING

A large production system built end to end by the founder with Claude Code: the SNAP backend our bookkeeping team lives in every day, a client portal, an AI categorization pipeline that writes to live QuickBooks ledgers nightly, a monthly close workflow, billing, and a few dozen cron jobs.

It works and it ships fast. What it does not have yet is the safety net: automated tests on the money paths, a staging environment, strict type checking, migration tooling, and monitoring that catches silent failures. The job is to keep the shipping speed and add the net.

~90 client businesses on the platform

~60 with live QuickBooks connections, growing every month

Real bookkeepers depend on it daily

This is not a side project — it is the system of work

AI-built codebase, fast shipping

Built with Claude Code. Will keep being extended this way

The safety net barely exists yet

Tests, staging, migrations, monitoring — that's the job

The Person

WHO YOU ARE

4–8 years shipping production web apps

With at least one stretch as the primary or only owner of something real users depended on. Real users, real bugs, real 2am incidents.

AI-native

You live in Claude Code or Cursor. AI-assisted development is how you work, and you know how to verify what an agent gives you before it touches money.

Full-stack and happy owning everything

Frontend, backend, database, integrations, deploys, and the operational grunt work that keeps it all alive.

You care about getting numbers right

If a dashboard shows a total that is off by 12%, that ruins your day until you know why.

Pragmatic shipper

You would rather improve a working system than tear it down to feel comfortable.

Not For You If

WHO THIS ISN'T FOR

You want to manage people instead of writing code

AI tools feel like cheating or a threat to you

Your first instinct is to rewrite before you understand

You need a clean greenfield and a team before you'll ship

You want the CTO title without the commits

The Stack

KNOW IT OR RAMP FAST

Next.js / React / TypeScript
Supabase (Postgres)
Vercel
QuickBooks Online API
Stripe + Plaid (you build it)
Anthropic API (AI pipelines)
Claude Code / Cursor daily
GoHighLevel + Resend

The Plan

YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS

01

Days 0–30

Ship something real to production in week one

Finish the deposits-into-revenue cleanup across the fleet

Sit with the bookkeepers and learn the monthly close end to end

02

Days 31–60

Verification gate from shadow mode to enforced

Automated tests + alerting on every path that writes to a ledger

Staging environment and a real migration pipeline

03

Days 61–90

Plaid architecture decided and a working spike live with pilot clients

Founder is out of day-to-day engineering — 15–20 hours a week back

The Offer

WHAT YOU GET

$150K–$190K base

Depending on experience and location

Up to 2% equity

4-year vest, 1-year cliff

Remote

North American time zones preferred

Paid final round

Real codebase, real bug, AI tools

The pitch is the upside and the ownership. A 4.5-to-1 LTV-to-CAC business, 300,000 painting contractors in the US before you count the other trades, and the platform is already the system of work for a real bookkeeping team. Ground floor, meaningful equity, and you get to define how engineering works here.

Apply

LET'S TALK

Skip the long cover letter. Show us how you think. Three paragraphs is plenty. We read every application personally.

Three Questions — A Paragraph Each Is Plenty

Ironbooks

© 2026 Ironbooks. All rights reserved.