Founding Engineer

New York
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

🚀 Founding Engineer, Thera (NYC, in-person)

Thera is building the financial OS for modern SMBs. Payroll, payments, treasury, spend, and accounting in one ecosystem that actually works end-to-end.

We're looking for our first NYC-based Founding Engineer to help scale the systems powering global payroll and money movement, work alongside our existing engineering team in India, and seed our in-person engineering culture from day one.

This is a true founding role. You'll be in the code, owning large pieces of the product, and working directly with the CEO.

📍 NYC, 5 days/week

Why we started Thera

Our founders saw firsthand how broken SMB payroll and finance had become. The average SMB stitches together 5+ tools just to pay people, move money, and close their books. We started Thera to collapse that fragmented stack into a single source of truth.

Backed by YC, 10X Founders, Zillionize, and Amino Capital.

What you'll own

  • Core systems powering global payroll and money movement

  • Large pieces of the product, end-to-end

  • Helping lead our existing engineering team of 5+ in India

  • Building our in-person engineering presence in NYC from scratch

  • Direct partnership with the CEO and product team

Your first 90 days

30 days

  • Ship a meaningful improvement or net-new feature on the spend product

  • Get deep with the product team and the India engineering team

60 days

  • Map out future builds across the roadmap

  • Start leading product meetings

90 days

  • Ship autonomously across at least one product surface

  • Help build out our NYC in-person engineering culture

  • Influence how we hire the next wave of engineers

About you

  • 3 to 7+ years building and shipping production systems

  • You thrive in ambiguity, move extremely fast, and care deeply about craft

  • Comfortable owning features end-to-end from zero to one

  • Bias toward action, simple solutions, and high standards

  • Comfortable working with a distributed team across time zones

Stack today: TypeScript + Java/Kotlin

Not a fit if

  • You want a pure management role

  • You avoid ambiguity or messy real-world systems

  • You're not willing to be in-person in NYC

Why Thera

  • Huge ownership and meaningful equity

  • Direct impact on product and culture

  • A chance to build one of the most important fintech platforms of the next decade

Read more about our cultural principles: https://www.getthera.com/principles

About Thera

AI-Native Finance OS

Required skills

Java
Kotlin

Other roles at Thera

Interested?

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Job details

Salary

$100,000 - $250,000

Equity

0.01% - 0.5%

Location

New York

Experience

3+ years

Company

NameThera
IndustryB2B
Team Size15

Funding

Total raised

$4.5M

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

DB

Dan Burke

Co-Founder & CTO

Akhil Reddy

Akhil Reddy

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.