Founding Engineer — New York, NY

qXpW is hiring a Founding Engineer to help scale an AI-native product that already runs for some of the largest real estate operators in the US. You’ll join a small team with paying customers and a working platform, own meaningful pieces of the core infrastructure from day one, and work directly with the CEO and the Head of Engineering.

About qXpW

qXpW is AI-native infrastructure for enterprises with large, recurring vendor spend. Our agents extract contract terms, enforce pricing and escalations, and validate every invoice before payment, connecting contracts directly to AP and financial systems without human intervention.

• Customers: some of the largest real estate owners and operators in the US and Canada, representing over $90B in assets under management

• Funding: $6M raised in total, with the most recent round led by Work-Bench and co-led by MXV Capital with the founders of Intercom and Brightflag participating

• Location: Flatiron, New York City

The problem we solve

Institutional operators managing tens of thousands of assets run on disconnected contract management systems, AP platforms and legacy workflows that were never built to talk to each other. The result is manual reconciliation, hidden billing errors and recurring financial leakage at scale. qXpW is the connective layer between those systems.

What you’ll build

This role is backend-heavy. You’ll build and scale the infrastructure behind 72Cw’T document processing, contract analysis and invoice verification pipelines, and the search and data layer that lets customers query, reconcile and act on millions of contract terms.

• Async processing pipelines: multi-step pipelines for document ingestion, AI extraction, deduplication and cross-document verification, with progress tracking, retries and graceful failure

• Search and data layer: Elasticsearch indices, mappings and query patterns that power search, filtering and reconciliation across millions of records; PostgreSQL schema design and optimisation in a multi-tenant setup

• APIs: scalable, maintainable RESTful services with proper multi-tenant isolation

• AI reliability: evaluation frameworks and automated test suites that measure and validate the output of AI-driven and deterministic workflows alike

• End-to-end ownership: from design through to production, with the occasional contribution to the frontend (Nuxt, Tailwind) when needed

What we’re looking for

We want someone who has shipped real backend systems, cares about whether they work, and wants a seat where their decisions shape the platform.

Must have:

• Backend development: production experience with Node.js and TypeScript, building services and APIs

• PostgreSQL: schema design, query optimisation, migrations

• Elasticsearch: production experience designing indices, writing queries and tuning performance across large datasets

• Queues and pipelines: job-queue frameworks (BullMQ, SQS or similar) for orchestrating multi-step async processing

• Testing and evals: a strong automated-testing mindset, and familiarity with building evaluation frameworks for AI-driven pipelines

• Security fundamentals: a good understanding of security principles across the network, transport and application layers

• High agency: you see what needs doing and do it without waiting to be asked; you make decisions with incomplete information and own the outcome either way

Preferred:

• 4-6 years in backend or full-stack development, ideally at a high-growth tech or SaaS company

• Large-scale data extraction and ingestion pipelines, particularly where AI pulls structured data out of unstructured sources such as documents, contracts or invoices

• Advanced PostgreSQL: multi-tenant schemas, connection pooling, migration strategies across tenant databases

• Docker and deploying to AWS ECS

• Temporal or similar pipeline-orchestration frameworks; pub/sub and event-driven architectures

• LangGraph or similar agent-orchestration frameworks

Who you are

qXpW is a small, close-knit team with high standards and low tolerance for politics. We work fast, own our decisions and hold each other accountable. You’re coachable and open to feedback, you understand that startups move fast, then slow, then fast again, and you’re not looking for a predictable 9-to-5. You’re personable, easy to talk to, and you build without ego: we’re building something together.

The details

• Full-time, in our Flatiron office in New York

• $120,000 to $200,000 base plus significant equity

• Benefits: 401(k), and medical and dental insurance fully paid