Fourth engineering hire, reporting directly to the CTO. A founding engineer builds whatever the company needs that week (product, infrastructure, tooling) because there is nobody else to hand it to, and works directly with whoever else is around; at that size, that was the founders themselves.
- Built the core platform matching homeowners who wanted solar with lenders willing to finance it.
- Built the loan application flow homeowners used, and the portal solar sales companies used to track their deals.
- Worked directly with the founders and execs, and with underwriting, business development, and marketing, to shape the product; there was no layer between engineering and the rest of the company yet.
- Helped decide what to build first: some of what we scoped in that room went on to generate well over $100M in revenue, which made prioritization the highest-stakes part of the job.
- Set up the foundations a company only gets one chance to do early: automated testing, deploy pipelines, and code standards the team still used years later.
Exciting and demanding in roughly equal parts.
Promoted from here into Technical Engineering Manager.