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Founding Engineer

Full-time·Remote (US or Canada)

Modern Research is on a mission to reduce the administrative burden felt by researchers and administrators. As a Founding Engineer, you will architect and build high-performance applications and shape our technical foundations as we grow. You will work across the stack, from crafting sleek front-end experiences to optimizing back-end infrastructure, ensuring speed, scalability, and impact.

What you’ll do

  • Build and ship full-stack applications that help institutions manage their grants and funding
  • Own features end-to-end (scope, design, ship, validate), working directly with customers and founders
  • Make key technical decisions that balance shipping speed with quality and maintainability
  • Develop and refine high-quality front-end interfaces
  • Architect and build out AI capabilities - agent-driven workflows for managing grant finances and compliance
  • Build the foundations of enterprise SaaS - RBAC, SSO, audit trails, integrations, security, and reliability
  • Talk to users, track metrics, and iterate quickly

Who you are

Must-haves

  • Strong system design and architecture instincts - you can take a vague requirement and produce a clean, durable design
  • A finely tuned sense of when to make tradeoffs, when to write tests, and when to invest in foundations vs. ship and revisit
  • A track record of moving fast while shipping high quality code
  • Strong product taste - you can go from a customer signal to a shipped feature
  • Comfortable owning big pieces of a product
  • Confidently navigate ambiguity and thoughtfully consider tradeoffs and design decisions

Nice to have

  • 5–10 years of professional software engineering experience
  • Familiarity with our stack: Typescript, React
  • Prior experience at a B2B SaaS startup
  • Experience building enterprise-readiness features (RBAC, audit logs, SSO, compliance tooling)
  • Experience building AI-powered features (RAG, agents, tool use)

Interested?

We’d love to hear from you. Send us a note about yourself and your work at info@modernresear.ch.