Founding Full-Stack Engineer

About Dirtdog

Over 90% of commercial real estate never hits a listing site. DirtDog finds it anyway.

DirtDog is an off-market site sourcing platform for commercial real estate. It scans geographic corridors, brand footprints, and zoning areas to surface the exact parcels that fit a buyer's criteria - then pierces LLC ownership structures using waterfall skip-trace enrichment and AI tooling to identify the real decision-maker behind each property and deliver their direct contact info.

The Role

You'll be DirtDog's founding engineer - the technical counterpart to a founder who deeply understands the product and the market, but needs someone who can fully own the code.

You'll come in, get your head around a substantial existing codebase quickly, and start shipping.

You'll work in person, side by side with the founder, with short feedback loops and a lot of autonomy. Decisions get made fast here, not long sprints.

What You'll Work On

• A production data pipeline — a multi-stage Python system that ingests, processes, filters, and enriches large third-party datasets with strict quality controls
• Third-party API integrations — the platform composes multiple external data and service providers; you'll own auth, rate limits, retries, webhooks, error handling, and cost discipline on usage-billed APIs
• AI-powered features — LLM-assisted data processing and resolution logic running in production, not demos
• Backend & data layer — Postgres schema design, migrations, and evolving the data architecture as the product scales
• The SaaS web application — the interface where customers run the product, review results, and take action
• Multi-tenant architecture — user orgs, accounts, roles, per-customer data isolation, and the auth and security model that goes with it
• Billing — Stripe integration: subscriptions, usage-based credits, and spend tracking
• Automation & infrastructure — scheduled jobs, event-driven flows, async processing, deployment, monitoring, and reliability
• Security & compliance — the product handles sensitive customer and contact data, with compliance requirements built into the pipeline

Who You Are

• A real full-stack engineer. We use AI development tools aggressively and you should too, but you need the fundamentals to know when generated code is wrong, why, and how to fix it. You can read a large codebase you didn't write, build a mental model quickly, and modify it with confidence.
• 3+ years of professional software engineering, with strong Python and solid SQL/Postgres
• Deep experience integrating third-party APIs — auth schemes, rate limits, retries, webhooks, pagination, etc.
• You've built or maintained multi-tenant SaaS — orgs, accounts, permissions, row-level security
• You've shipped Stripe billing (or equivalent) — subscriptions, metered/usage-based pricing, or credits
• Comfortable owning infrastructure — deployment, background jobs, logging, monitoring, and the security posture of a system holding sensitive data
• Fast and pragmatic. You'd rather ship a well-tested 80% solution this week than a perfect one next quarter, and you know which 20% actually matters
• A strong communicator who can work face-to-face with a non-engineer founder, explaining trade-offs plainly, pushing back when needed, and translating business goals into technical decisions

Nice To Have:

• Experience working with geospatial or location-based data
• Real estate, PropTech, or other data-heavy vertical SaaS background
• LLM/AI-powered features shipped in production (structured extraction, classification, agents)
• React/TypeScript for frontend work
• Email or outreach infrastructure experience (deliverability, verification, sequencing)
• Early-stage startup experience as an early or founding engineer

Why This Role:

• Founding engineer ownership — you're not a cog on a platform team; the entire technical surface is yours
• A product that already works — already has users generating real revenue relevance; you're scaling something proven and not searching for product-market fit from zero
• A founder who gets it — Andy knows the domain better than anyone having worked in the space and knows where the gas are
• Direct impact — every improvement you ship shows up in demos, deals, and revenue within days

Compensation

• $100,000–$160,000 base, depending on experience
• Full-time, on-site in Indianapolis, IN, working directly with the founder