founding product engineer

sidething is an AI accelerator for people turning side projects into real businesses.

Building something has never been easier. Turning it into something people want, pay for and keep coming back to is still hard. That's the gap we're closing.

sidething understands what someone is working on, learns the business around it, works out what matters next and helps them execute. Roadmap, business intelligence, accountability, playbooks, connected tools and AI in one system, designed to take small teams from "I built something" to "this is working". The long term aim is to be the operating system behind a new generation of tiny, highly capable businesses. The product is live, there's a lot already there, and we're hiring our first engineer.

We're looking for an exceptional product engineer who wants to get unusually close to the product and own a large part of what it becomes.

You'll work directly with the founder across product and engineering, taking ideas from rough concept through to something users can put their hands on. That might be a new AI workflow, a better core interaction, a change to the data model, a new integration, a production fix, or pushing back on an idea because you've found a better way to solve the problem.

This is a broad role by design. We don't want someone who only thinks about the codebase. We want someone who cares about how the product feels, where users get stuck, what keeps them coming back and what should exist next.

You'll have substantial ownership over architecture and technical direction too, but the centre of gravity is the product. The goal is an exceptional product, not an engineering function for its own sake.

The technical problems should get more interesting as we grow. Today the AI layer is mostly frontier models and orchestration. Over time sidething will build a proprietary dataset around how early stage businesses develop: what founders try, what works, what fails, what leads to revenue and what should happen next.

That opens a natural path into model evaluation, routing, inference optimisation, fine tuning, proprietary training data, smaller specialised models and eventually models we train ourselves. You don't need to arrive as an ML researcher. We do want someone who finds that direction exciting and wants to grow into more sophisticated AI work.

AI has been part of how sidething gets made from the beginning. We use tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and frontier models aggressively because they give small teams enormous leverage, and we expect that to stay part of the engineering culture as the company grows.

We care about judgement more than how much code someone types by hand. The right person knows when to move quickly, when something needs proper engineering depth, and how to use AI without outsourcing their understanding of the system.

The stack today is TypeScript and JavaScript, Supabase and Postgres, auth, storage and realtime infrastructure, Netlify, Cloudflare, Stripe, Resend, OAuth integrations, and AI infrastructure across Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity and Composio. None of it is sacred. We expect the stack to move with the product.

You're probably a very strong full stack or product engineer who wants more ownership than a normal engineering role gives you. You've taken things from zero before, professionally or for yourself, and you move across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure and AI without worrying much about where one discipline ends and another begins.

You care about product quality. You notice friction, bad interactions and things that feel cheap. You can work from an incomplete brief, make good decisions quickly and change your mind when the evidence changes. You'd rather own a whole problem than spend years becoming the expert in one narrow layer of someone else's system.

You don't need to have been a CTO, managed a large engineering team or spent years on ML research. You don't need a particular degree or a perfect match with our stack. We'd rather hire someone exceptional who learns fast, has strong product instincts and wants a large amount of ownership.

There's a real product, real users and a clear direction, so you're not joining an idea on a whiteboard. We're still early enough that the first engineer can shape the product, the architecture, the engineering culture and eventually the team.

You get the ownership and influence that comes with joining this early, without the stress of being a co-founder. You're not here to raise money, manage a board or own every function in the business because you joined first. Your job is to get deeply embedded in the product and help make sidething exceptional.

For the right person the scope can grow a long way, including into leading engineering here. We care about leaving room for someone exceptional to earn a very large remit.