Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer: Hands-On, Agent-First

Full-time from day one · Remote worldwide · Competitive salary plus meaningful equity

About FrontierU

FrontierU is building a private global community for selectively admitted young people aged 16 and over. Members connect with ambitious peers, collaborate, learn, and receive personalised AI mentorship from Socrates.

A substantial working platform and automated test suite already exist. We are hiring a hands-on CTO to take full ownership of the technology, complete the product, launch it, and run it.

The role

This is not a traditional executive role for someone who has moved away from engineering.

You will personally direct the architecture, development, integration, deployment, security, and operation of FrontierU. You will use AI agents as your primary source of engineering capacity through the agentic harness—or combination of tools—you judge best.

No particular harness is required. You will have the authority to select, combine, replace, or build the tools that produce the best results.

You may build a human engineering team where people add expertise, judgment, or operational coverage. However, FrontierU intends to remain lean. You should know how to get exceptional output from agents before solving every capacity problem through hiring.

You will work directly with the founder and have broad authority over technical execution. You will also be accountable for everything your agents produce.

Your objectives

Within your first 30 days: achieve full prototype parity. Your first objective is to finish the platform so the implemented product matches FrontierU’s approved product prototype. The prototype, discrepancy analysis, backlog, and acceptance criteria are already documented. Significant parts of the product are already built.

You will:

• Take control of the codebase, architecture, backlog, development environments, documentation, and existing agent workflows.
• Turn the remaining work into clear, independently executable lanes for AI agents.
• Complete the remaining product experiences, backend behaviour, integrations, and prototype discrepancies.
• Integrate and review work that is complete or already in progress.
• Ensure every feature works end to end. A rendered interface without correct permissions, persistence, error handling, and tests does not count as complete.
• Preserve FrontierU’s access controls, safeguards for younger Members, audit requirements, and privacy guarantees.
• Keep the automated tests and all engineering quality gates green.
• Demonstrate full prototype parity on a production-like staging environment by the end of the month.
• Any dependency requiring a founder, legal, infrastructure, or vendor decision must be identified during the first week, with a clear recommendation and decision deadline. It must not remain a hidden blocker.

Within your first 90 days: launch FrontierU

After reaching prototype parity, you will make the platform ready for real users and lead its production launch.

You will:

• Run structured founder testing, closed-beta testing, and end-to-end testing of all critical journeys.
• Resolve every launch-critical defect and establish a disciplined process for triaging everything else.
• Complete the production configuration of infrastructure and external services.
• Maintain the required European data-residency and privacy posture.
• Establish monitoring, structured logging, alerts, health checks, operational dashboards, and incident response.
• Put automated backups in place and prove that production data can be restored.
• Document deployment, database migration, rollback, recovery, and security procedures.
• Verify the security baseline, including authentication, authorization, rate limiting, secrets, staff permissions, auditability, encryption, and abuse prevention.
• Complete accessibility testing of public and Applicant-facing journeys and resolve material violations.
• Verify the platform against agreed performance targets using production-like data.
• Launch the platform and remain responsible for its operational stability.

You will:

• Maintain the production system and respond quickly when Members or Staff surface bugs.
• Own incident response, root-cause analysis, security updates, dependency upgrades, capacity, performance, and infrastructure costs.
• Define and meet appropriate reliability and response-time objectives.
• Deliver the next stages of the product roadmap.
• Improve FrontierU’s AI systems through evaluations, safety testing, model comparison, and measured iteration.
• Turn the agent workflow into a durable engineering operating system that others can use.
• Co