Founding Software EngineerOwn the stack, from UI to AI systems.

About Cenara

Cenara is building the intelligence layer for how revenue decisions get made. We sit above conversations, systems, and human judgment to transform raw, unstructured signals into clear, high-leverage decisions: what matters, what's at risk, and what to do next. Our goal is to eliminate reactive selling and replace it with systems that reason, learn, and compound insight over time. For engineers, this is a chance to work on real-world reasoning systems, agentic workflows, and human-AI collaboration at the sharp edge of business impact, where every model decision directly shapes outcomes.

What you'll do

We're looking for a product-minded engineer who can independently own features and services from design through production. You'll work across frontend, backend, AI systems, databases, integrations, and infrastructure. You'll use AI coding tools heavily, but judgment remains the job: you're responsible for every design decision and every line you ship.

• Own end-to-end: take features from product understanding and low-level design through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing operation with limited supervision.
• Design with judgment: apply SOLID principles and established design patterns where they improve the system, not by default. Define entities, relationships, interfaces, and abstractions appropriate to the problem.
• Build for change: write modular, extensible code that can accommodate likely requirements without major rewrites. Handle concurrency, state, and thread safety where relevant.
• Ensure correctness: deliver working systems with critical flows tested end to end. Handle edge cases deliberately, debug systematically, and take ownership of production failures.
• Contribute to system design: design components, APIs, data models, and storage, caching, and queuing approaches while reasoning about scale, reliability, and failure modes.
• Build AI systems: develop reliable LLM and agentic workflows across retrieval, tool use, orchestration, memory, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop actions.
• Use AI with judgment: treat AI-assisted development as a multiplier. Review outputs critically, reject incorrect assumptions and fabricated APIs, and improve weak architecture rather than shipping it faster.
• Raise the quality bar: improve the systems you touch through thoughtful reviews, better abstractions, stronger testing, and clear technical decisions.

This role is ideal if you

• Are product-minded, low-ego, and accountable for outcomes, not just assigned code.
• Are comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs and unblocking yourself without detailed specifications.
• Can design moderately scoped systems and reason clearly about the trade-offs behind them.
• Write maintainable code that evolves with the product instead of code that has to be rewritten.
• Take ownership of production failures rather than routing them elsewhere.
• Would rather own the whole stack than one narrow lane.

Minimum

• 3-7 years of hands-on software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals across frontend applications, backend APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure.
• A track record of independently delivering significant features or services end to end.
• Strong low-level design and the ability to design moderately scoped systems.
• Sound understanding of software design principles, common design patterns, testing, debugging, and reliability.
• Experience building LLM-powered products, agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or tool-calling workflows.

Backgrounds that tend to succeed

• Product-minded engineers who've owned features end to end at an early-stage company.
• Former founders, or first engineers who built a product from nothing.
• Engineers who've shipped LLM or agentic features into production, not just prototypes.
• Full-stack engineers who've owned both backend systems and the user experience on top of them.