Software Engineer
Ploy · San Francisco
About Ploy
Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.
We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.
The role
As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.
What you’ll do
Build 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.
Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.
Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.
Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.
Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on-call hygiene.
Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.
What we’re looking for
Must-haves
Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).
Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end + backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.
Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.
Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.
Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.
Nice-to-haves
Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).
Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).
Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.
Experience in the web and marketing space
How we work
Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.
Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.
Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.
We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.
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