Founding Full-Stack Engineer

An early-stage pre-launch startup built by experienced venture builders needs a Founding Frontend Engineer before launch. Pre-launch timelines are tight. This is an urgent hire.

Radical ownership of the products UI/UX working directly with the founder. High autonomy on approach and speed paired with hands-on execution: shipping frontend features personally and building backend endpoints when the product needs it. No rigid process no mandatory code review blunt feedback culture.

• Build and ship SvelteKit applications end to end: routing load functions server-side rendering form actions and client-side state management.

• Write component-level TypeScript with strict typing; no any as a default and no unchecked casts to bypass the compiler.

• Implement responsive accessible UI with Tailwind CSS including custom design systems and component variants not utility classes copied from templates.

• Build and expose REST or RPC endpoints in Fastify including request validation (schema-based) error handling and auth middleware.

• Write and modify Postgres schemas: design tables write and roll back migrations and write raw SQL or use a query builder (Drizzle Kysely or Prisma) for non-trivial queries.

• Own performance on the frontend: bundle size hydration cost load waterfall and Core Web Vitals.

• Set up or maintain CI/CD for a app: build lint type-check deploy.

• Debug production issues across the full stack without handing off to a backend specialist.

• 4 years of professional frontend engineering with at least 1-2 years using SvelteKit specifically. Deep verifiable experience in another modern reactive framework (React Vue) is acceptable only if paired with proof of fast ramp-up on Svelte.

• Strict TypeScript: comfortable with generics discriminated unions and typing complex API responses. Can explain without hesitation why any is a problem and how to avoid it.

• Working knowledge of Fastify specifically or deep equivalent experience in another framework (Express Hono NestJS) with fast ramp-up expected on Fastifys plugin and hook system.

• Hands-on Postgres skills: schema design indexing basics writing and reverting migrations and diagnosing slow queries with EXPLAIN. Comfortable in the psql CLI not only through an ORM GUI.

• Tailwind CSS in production: custom theme configuration component abstraction and responsive design without excessive utility duplication.

• Public GitHub profile with commit history that verifiably backs the stack above or a live functioning product built end to end that can be tested directly.

• Able to walk through a real production incident or bug you fixed across both frontend and backend in the same session.

• Based in Europe working remotely with significant working-hours overlap with a founder-led team.

• No public GitHub profile or live shipped product demonstrating this exact stack.

• Frontend-only background with no working knowledge of backend CRUD API design or SQL.

• Has only used an ORM and never written raw SQL or cannot explain what a migration does.

• Loose TypeScript usage: any everywhere no shared types between frontend and backend no type safety across the API boundary.

• No experience with schema validation error handling or auth middleware on a real backend service.

• Exclusively enterprise background with narrow siloed scope and no end-to-end product ownership.

• Ex-founder or entrepreneurial background.

• Side projects shipped for paying clients with real users and real uptime requirements.

• Direct production experience with SvelteKit Tailwind and Fastify together not just individually.

• Experience setting up a project from zero: repo CI hosting database auth.