Founding Engineering Lead

Engineering

Durham, NC // In-office 5 days/week // Up to 25% travel

$100,000-$150,000 base + founding equity

This job is for a builder who wants to own the whole machine. Not a manager who wants a bigger team to sit on top of. Someone who still ships, who reaches for the keyboard before the org chart, and who knows that at this stage the fastest way to build a great engineering org is to be the best engineer in it first.

Every company in America has a marketing compliance problem. They just don't know it yet. Billion-dollar brands are getting sued, fined, and shut down because a landing page had the wrong disclaimer. A social post missed a disclosure. An influencer went off-script. The legal review process is broken: weeks of back-and-forth, bottlenecked by overworked compliance teams, while competitors ship faster.

Warrant is the first AI agent for marketing compliance. We give financial services, insurance, consumer goods, and enterprise companies instant compliance feedback so they can launch faster, stay audit-ready, and never get caught off guard. We're backed by Brickyard, The Legal Tech Fund, Capitalize VC, Techstars, and Vast Ventures, alongside operators from Brex, Slope, and Mercury. We're not building a feature. We're building the category.

The Deal

You own engineering, end to end. Architecture, shipping velocity, the roadmap, the hiring, and the infrastructure that lets a regulated buyer trust us with their most sensitive work. That last part is not a footnote. Selling AI into compliance teams means SOC 2, security reviews, and audit-readiness are core to the product, and they are yours to own from day one.

You'll sit next to the CEO five days a week and see every decision that goes into building a company: pricing, fundraising, hiring, product, positioning. Nothing is hidden from you. What you build and how fast you build it will decide how fast the whole company moves.

This is a player-coach role, and for a while the player half is bigger than the coach half. You'll be writing production code, using Claude Code, making the hard architectural calls, and setting the bar for everyone who comes after you. As we grow, you build and lead the team that inherits it.

This is not a 9 to 5. We routinely put in 10+ hour days, in the office, five days a week. If you need someone to tell you when to start and stop working, this isn't for you. If you'd rather outbuild the competition than complain about work-life balance, you're our people.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

Shipping the product. You're hands-on in the codebase every day, building the AI agent that reads marketing content and catches compliance problems before they ship. You set the standard for quality, speed, and how we use AI to build faster than teams ten times our size.

Owning security and SOC 2. Our buyers are compliance officers and GCs. Trust is the product. You own SOC 2, security posture, data handling, and the audit-readiness that lets us close regulated customers without a six-month security review killing the deal.

Making the architecture calls. What we build, how we build it, what we buy versus build, and how it scales. You own the technical roadmap and the tradeoffs that come with moving fast without breaking the things that matter.

Building the team. As we grow, you hire and lead the engineers who inherit what you built. You set the culture, the bar, and the systems that make a small team perform like a big one.

Shaping the company. You'll understand what's technically possible better than anyone in the building. What you know will change what we promise customers, how we price it, and what we build next.

Who We're Looking For

• You still ship. You're a senior or staff-level engineer who leads by doing, not by delegating. You've owned real production systems and you can point to what you built.
• You've done 0-to-1. You've built something from nothing, ideally at an early-stage startup. You know the difference between engineering for scale you have and scale you're pretending to have.
• You get security and compliance, or you can learn it fast. SOC 2, secure data handling, and audit-readiness don't scare you. Bonus if you've taken a company through SOC 2 before.
• You are "AI-native." Your default is to use AI to build. You use Claude and every tool that makes you faster, and you have opinions about how to build with AI, not just talk about it.
• You want the ownership. This is a role where you run engineering, not a seat on a big team. If that's the job you want, say so.
• Bonus points for: regtech or fintech experience, taking a product through SOC 2, time at a pre-Series A company, or a failed startup (seriously).

What You Get

• $100,000-$150,000 base plus equity. Real ownership in a category-creating company with a guaranteed raise post Seed round.
• A founding-team seat. Direct access to the CEO, investors, and every decision that builds a company from zero.
• Total ownership of engineering, a steep learning curve, and the leverage to make one of the most important hires and calls in the company.

How To Get An Interview

Don't send a resume. Send something you built. Vibe-code something, anything, and send it to Austin Carroll, our CEO. Show us how you think, how you use AI to build, and what you ship when nobody hands you a spec. The thing itself matters less than what it says about how you work. Creativity encouraged, cold outreach expected.

• Before you reach out, read our candidate code of conduct.