Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer, Landmarker

Location: Oslo, on site. This is not a remote role. Title: Founding Engineer internally, Technical Director when you meet customers Compensation: Salary plus meaningful equity

You will not manage a team. You will build the platform, mostly by yourself, and hire the team once there is something to hire for.

If that sounds like a step down, stop reading. If it sounds like the first honest job ad you have read this year, keep going.

The problem

Under every street in Europe there are pipes and cables nobody has a reliable map of. Contractors dig blind and hit things. Municipalities still process excavation permits by email.

The deeper problem is the data itself. A register tells you what is supposed to be under the road. As built documentation tells you what is actually there, and for most of Europe that documentation is paper drawings, scanned PDFs, CAD files and survey logs that nobody can query. Every trench that gets closed without proper capture makes the next one more dangerous.

We work on both halves. The workflow that tells you what is down there before you dig, and the pipeline that captures what actually went into the ground and turns decades of unstructured records into spatial data you can trust.

This is not a glamorous problem. It is an unavoidable one. Every road project, every fibre rollout and every district heating pipe in Europe runs into it.

graveinfo.no is live with Norwegian utilities and contractors. Jard handles the municipal side. Next stop is DACH.

What you will own

The platform. Architecture, codebase, technical direction. You decide how it is built and you write most of it.

Making it work across countries. Norway is one regulatory regime with one set of public registries. Germany is another. The architecture has to absorb a new country without becoming a new product.

The data. Capturing what actually goes into the ground, from field survey to as built documentation, and converting analogue and semi structured archives into positioned, versioned, queryable geometry. Coordinate systems, tolerances, provenance, conflicting sources. This is closer to data engineering than to CRUD, and it is where our long term advantage sits.

The integration surface. Public registries, utility data, national digital infrastructure. Every new market brings its own. Your job is to make that routine instead of a project each time.

Being the technical voice in the room. With partners, with customers, with public bodies. This part of the job is not optional and it is why you carry Technical Director externally.

How we work

Everyone here writes code, including people whose job title says nothing about engineering. We work AI first and we are not going back.

That is our biggest advantage and our biggest risk. Fast, no bottleneck between an idea and a working thing. Also: code written by people who are not engineers, accumulating quietly. It does not show at three months. It shows at eighteen.

Making that safe without killing it is one of the harder parts of this job. We want someone who has an opinion about it.

What we are looking for

Someone who learns fast. This is the main criterion. Nobody arrives knowing utility infrastructure data, Norwegian public registries and German procurement. We are hiring for learning speed, not for a matching CV.

Concretely: you have changed stack or domain at least once and became productive in months, not years. You can explain something you learned recently in real depth, unprompted.

Someone who still builds. You should be able to ship like a senior engineer while thinking like an architect. In this phase, the building is the job.

Someone who has owned an architecture in production, with real users and real consequences when it breaks.

Someone who can lead without an org chart. Everyone here codes. Technical authority has to work sideways, not downwards.

Solid fundamentals in a typed web stack. Ours is TypeScript, Postgres and self hosted infrastructure. Yours does not have to be.

In Oslo, or willing to move here. We work together in one room and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you are elsewhere in Europe and this is the right job, we will help you move. Fluent English is required. Norwegian is useful and not required.

Some experience of being responsible for other people's work. A team, an open source project, a student organisation. We care that you have done it, not where.

What we are not looking for

Anyone who wants a finished team. Anyone who stopped writing code years ago. Anyone who thinks AI tooling is cheating. Anyone who wants to rewrite the system before understanding it.

Two honest things

We are small. Not a startup in the funded and hiring sense. Small in that you will be alone with this for a while sense.

We are in Oslo and we work on site. Norway is expensive, dark for a few months, and worth it for the rest. If you are relocating, ask us anything about what that actually costs.

And the CTO title is reserved. As we move into regulated markets in DACH, think national rail and defence, we expect to hire a CTO focused on certification, clearance and compliance. Different job, not your boss. You will help hire them, and we would rather tell you now than surprise you in year three.

What you get

Equity that matters, in the range a founding engineer should expect. Technical decisions that are yours to make, in writing. A seat at the table when we decide how we enter Germany. And a system that thousands of people will depend on without ever knowing your name.

How to apply

Skip the cover letter. Send us your CV or profile, plus a few paragraphs on something technical you learned in the last year and what surprised you about it.

That is the actual test. We will read those first.