Founding Software Engineer

Job description

## Our Product Ryvn builds the deployment infrastructure that powers mission-critical software in industries where reliability matters most — from healthcare and finance to manufacturing and beyond. Our platform enables teams to deliver software continuously and securely across complex environments, replacing fragile manual workflows with intelligent, automated orchestration. We’re rethinking how modern enterprises ship code — ensuring that updates move safely from development to production with speed, precision, and confidence. ## Our Company Ryvn is a **Y Combinator–backed**, seed-stage startup based in **New York City**, where our fully in-person team is building the next generation of deployment infrastructure. We combine the pace of a startup with the discipline of production-grade engineering — solving hard technical problems that have immediate real-world impact. Our team draws experience from **Palantir, Vercel, and Capital One**, blending expertise in distributed systems, developer platforms, and enterprise software. We’re backed by top investors who share our belief that the most critical industries deserve infrastructure that’s fast, reliable, and built to last. ## About the Role As a Founding Software Engineer at Ryvn, you’ll design and build distributed systems that transform how organizations deploy and manage software at scale. You’ll work across the stack — from core platform services and APIs to performance optimization and developer experience — owning problems end-to-end and shipping code that runs in production environments across healthcare, finance, and manufacturing. You’ll work side-by-side with the founders to shape Ryvn’s technical architecture, product roadmap, and engineering culture. This is a rare opportunity to join early, build foundational systems from first principles, and help define the DNA of a company reimagining how software reaches the world. ## What You’ll Do - **Build at scale:** Design, build, and maintain highly available systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of production environments - **Shape the foundation:** Work directly with the founding team to define Ryvn’s technical direction and architecture - **Solve and streamline:** Identify inefficiencies and design elegant solutions — with the autonomy to ship fast and keep our technology ahead of the curve - **Own complex systems:** Debug performance issues across distributed systems, from backend services to production infrastructure - **Balance tradeoffs:** Navigate engineering decisions thoughtfully — balancing short-term velocity with long-term scalability and impact ## What We’re Looking For - **3+ years of software development experience**, ideally including time at a small, high-growth company - **Full-stack fluency:** Comfortable working across web frameworks, APIs, and databases in multiple programming languages - **Strong technical judgment:** Able to make pragmatic, well-reasoned tradeoffs to drive projects forward - **Ownership mindset:** You take initiative, see problems through, and care deeply about the systems you build ## Nice-to-haves - Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure - Experience deploying and scaling Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker - Familiarity with CI/CD tooling, especially GitHub Actions - Experience building with Go, TypeScript, and React - Comfort working with Postgres and S3 - Experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Mimir for observability - Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation ## Life at Ryvn - Fully in-person team in NYC - Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance - Unlimited PTO and sick leave - Annual professional development stipend - Company-paid lunch, dinner, and coffee - Annual retreats and team offsites