Founding Full Stack Engineer

About Skim:

Skim is on a mission to revolutionise how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) discover and apply for EU government contracts. Imagine a software from the movie War Dogs. Navigating the complexities of public procurement can be daunting, especially when language barriers come into play. That’s where we step in. Skim provides end-to-end support, from contract recommendations and buyer insights to an AI-powered co-pilot for crafting WINNING applications! Our goal is clear, allow companies to apply for government contracts in minutes not months.

About the Role:

As our Founding Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the product and the engineering culture of an early-stage startup with a bold vision. You will shape the development of the company, and take on big responsibilities.

We are looking for ambitious and competitive people who are curious, and eager to jump into a new industry, learn quickly and improve how every human in the world interacts with government contracts for a better experience.

What You’ll Do:

• Play a pivotal role in building out the engineering team.
• Develop, implement (and optimize) robust, scalable solutions in a microservices architecture.
• Develop and optimize our customer-facing web app built with Next.js (TS)
• Collaborate on improving our vectorDB-powered engine -
• Iterate on the existing data pipelines for daily contract ingestion—leveraging serverless architectures and tools like AWS Lambda, Step Functions, and PostgreSQL to process and store high volumes of structured and unstructured data efficiently.
• Explore state-of-the-art agentic workflows to automate E2E tasks. Innovate with the latest models!
• Build and deploy containerized applications using Docker and orchestrate them with AWS EKS/EKS to streamline deployments and manage workloads efficiently.
• Establish robust monitoring and logging systems to track performance, detect bottlenecks, and proactively address issues and bugs before they impact users.
• Be a Leader. Set technical direction, establish best practices, and mentor junior hires as we grow.

What We’re Looking For:

• Worked 3+ years at a Pre-Seed / Seed stage company, built it and watched it grow.
• English fluency
• Proficiency with relational and vector database systems.
• You’re a thoughtful problem solver - you see a problem, ensure you completely understand the context, and then work towards a clean solution.
• You excel at working independently and with a team, and you are comfortable asking for help when you get stuck.
• You put users at the centre. You have empathy and patience to understand our users’ needs and expectations and the balance between product, sales, and operations.
• You are open to experiencing new technologies. The thought of controlling many tools to create business impact excites you.

Technical requirements:

• Proven Experience in cloud-based, microservices architecture provisioning and RESTful API development.
• Proven experience working with React/Next.js (TypeScript), Node.js, and PostgreSQL, Python, Docker. Strong understanding of RESTful API design, implementation, and optimization.
• You have experience scaling production software to support rapid growth, monitoring production systems, and managing resource constraints.
• Experience working with modern genAI frameworks such as Langchain, LlamaIndex, crewAI, etc. (ADVANTAGE)
• Experience with unit and automation testing, CI/CD, AWS, and DevOps practices (ADVANTAGE)
• Hands-on experience building scalable, automated data pipelines to process large datasets. Experience with XML/JSON transformations, ETL processes, and data storage optimization. (ADVANTAGE)

Bonus Points:

• Love Formula 1 and/or Tennis
• You have embarked on an entrepreneurial venture in the past
• Competition experience in sports, coding, chess, academia or any other hobby
• Figma proficiency
• Business, Entrepreneurship, Mathematics, Science, Computer Science Bachelor