Founding Systems Engineer (International)

Background

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP.

We're hiring a systems software engineer who has tackled hard technical problems help us build core 0→1 systems at the intersection of software, hardware, and finance. You'll help architect and ship systems that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more.

Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options:

• You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.

• You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.

• You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

What you’ll do:

• Wrap beautiful and simple abstractions around gnarly complexity, lots of data, and legacy systems

• Own full product lifecycle—from customer pain → full-stack design → 0-to-1 full-stack engineering → ship product

• Design and deploy production-grade LLM systems that automate core loan operations (e.g., underwriting, compliance, document processing)

• Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession

You’ll be a great fit if...

• You've solved hard technical problems most of your peers haven't encountered — and you can explain exactly how your solution works to extreme depth

• You gravitate toward thinking in systems, infrastructure, and architectural tradeoffs

• You have strong opinions about what good abstractions look like

• You have deep experience with Node.js, TypeScript, Postgres, and AWS

• You prefer hard backend problems, but are comfortable building frontends and have UI design taste

• You can overlap at least 6 hours with PST working hours (8am-5pm PST)

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Compensation

• $120-$170K base + $35,000-70,000 equity

• Best-in-class medical, dental, vision

• 401K

• Unlimited vacation

Next Steps

If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com with the following (your app won't be considered without these). Keep answers to less than 3 sentences each:

• If you could have one person's career arc, who would it be and why?

• What's an unpopular truth you believe in?

• What's the most technically challenging system you've ever built? Include the tech stack you chose, why you chose them other alternatives, key technical challenges and how you solved them, and any architectural tradeoffs you had to make.

• Your current time zone and confirmation you can have 6 hours of overlap with PST working hours

• Availability for a 30min call