“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
Every engineer eventually finds out which side of the galaxy they are on.
One side is the Empire. Enormous. Gleaming. Impossible to steer. You get a badge, a bay, a ticket queue and a performance cycle. Somewhere above you, eleven levels of command decide what ships. Your code is excellent and almost nobody sees it. The catering is genuinely very good.
The other side is a small crew in a fast ship, flying straight at something that everyone said could not be done.
This is the small crew.
The mission
Imagine a machine that understands taste. Not in the vague marketing sense, in the working sense. A system that learns what a company looks like, sounds like and feels like, then produces world class creative work on its own, at a volume no human studio could match, without losing the thing that made it good in the first place.
That is what this team is building. AI plus creative, pointed at one of the last genuinely human jobs anyone thought was safe. They already do it for customers you would recognise. The next chapter is turning that into a product anyone can pick up and use, and that is the part you are being hired for.
The founders are the interesting bit. One trained as an artist before switching to computer science. The other has been writing code for more than a decade. They argue about frame timing and system design in the same conversation. Craft is not a tax on velocity here, it is the whole point.
What you will actually build
You are one of the first engineers in. There is no platform team to hand the hard half to, and no design system waiting for you. You build the thing, end to end.
The interface. React and Next.js. This is a creative product, so the interface is the product. Motion, latency, feel, the 4px that is wrong. A CTO who came out of art school will notice, and will say so.
The backend. Node, the app layer, workspaces, state, the API the whole self serve product runs on.
The generation layer. Python. Model orchestration, prompt and scene construction, assembly, and the evaluation logic that catches a bad output before a customer ever sees it.
The agents. LLM powered agents and agent architectures. The system has to plan the work, not just render it. Multi step reasoning, tool use, branching, retries, guardrails, and the unglamorous engineering that makes an autonomous pipeline survive contact with reality.
The infrastructure. Long running jobs, queues, media processing, storage, delivery, and cost per run. Generation is slow, expensive and fails in creative ways. Someone owns the difference between a forty second wait and a four minute one. That someone is you.
If human in the loop or preference learning is in your background, bring it up early. Teaching a system what good looks like is the core problem here, not a side quest.
“The Force will be with you. Always.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars
Who this is for
Zero to three years as a full stack engineer, and they mean it. This is not a disguised staff role wearing a founding title. What they are buying is speed, taste and the nerve to own a surface with no map.
You will fit if:
- Python and JavaScript are both genuinely yours, React and Next.js specifically
- You have shipped production web applications end to end, front, back and infrastructure
- You have been a founder, a founding engineer, or employee number small at a startup where your job description changed monthly
- You have spent time somewhere that takes creative tools or generative AI seriously, the design led product companies and the frontier labs alike
- You have built LLM powered things that real people used, not demos
- You can defend a technical decision under pressure, and tell a founder they are wrong when they are wrong
- You make things outside of work. Design, film, music, art, weird side projects. It does not have to be professional. It counts more than you think
Selective programs like Contrary, Neo Scholars or KP Fellows are a strong signal, not a requirement.
Who this is not for
If your entire career is a straight line through the biggest companies in tech, with no startup chapter anywhere and nothing you built yourself, this will not work. Not because that work is easy, but because this job has no scaffolding, no roadmap handed down and no one to escalate to at 11pm.
Coming from a giant is fine. Having only ever been inside one is the problem. Big tech plus a company you started, plus something you shipped alone that people actually used, is a very strong profile here.
The deal
- USD $250,000 to $275,000 base, set by timing and profile
- Founding equity, materially larger the earlier you land
- Lunch and dinner daily
- Five days a week in the San Francisco office. In the room, with the founders, every day. If that sounds like a cost rather than the point, this is not your ship
- US work authorisation required. No visa sponsorship of any kind, so US citizens and Green Card holders only
- Multiple hires being made on this search
Boarding
The Empire is hiring too. Better parking, clearer ladder, nobody remembers your name.
Send your CV, your GitHub, and whatever you have made that you are quietly proud of.
Keiran Hathorn, Big Wave Digital
keiran@bigwavedigital.com.au
