Founding Engineer — Full-Stack & AI
subcraftaiMadison, WI
About the role
Founding Engineer — Full-Stack & AISubcraft.ai · Full-time · Early-stage startup About Subcraft Subcraft.ai is an early-stage fintech startup building an AI-powered platform that helps subscription businesses recover failed payments and reduce involuntary churn. A meaningful share of subscription churn is involuntary: customers who want to stay but lose access because a payment failed. Cards expire, funds run short, issuers decline, and fraud filters misfire. Recovering that revenue means deciding when to retry, how and where to reach the customer, and doing it without hurting the customer relationship. Our platform combines intelligent payment retries, machine learning, and payment analytics, and works with the payment and billing platforms merchants already use.
The role:
We’re hiring a hands-on Founding Engineer to own Subcraft’s technology, working directly with our CEO. You’ll set the technical direction, write much of the code, with a path to build and lead the engineering team. What you’ll own
- Architecture and development of our cloud-based, full-stack platform
- Our AI-powered recovery engine, including experimentation and performance measurement
- Integrations with the payment, billing, and merchant platforms our customers rely on
- Infrastructure, security, reliability, and company IT
- Our security and compliance program, including SOC 2, PCI DSS, and privacy regulations
- Engineering execution: guiding contractors, reviewing code, and setting standards
- Turning business priorities and merchant needs into a technical roadmap
- Being the technical voice with merchants, partners, and investors
What we’re looking for:
- 5+ years of hands-on software engineering, ideally building and scaling SaaS products
- Strong full-stack skills across frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience putting AI/ML into production and into real business workflows
- Experience building third-party integrations; payments, subscription billing, or fintech experience is a strong plus
- Solid grounding in application security and data protection
- Ability to lead contractors, review code, and own delivery independently
- Clear, honest communication with technical and non-technical people
- A startup mindset: comfortable writing code and making architecture calls in the same day
Nice to have:
- Knowledge of card networks, issuer decline behavior, or payment-failure analytics
- Familiarity with subscription metrics like churn, retention, and lifetime value
- Experience in subscription ecommerce, fraud, or risk
- Interest in growing into an engineering leadership role
What success looks like: First 90 days
- You know our product, platform, and merchants well enough to run a demo on your own
- Contractor work runs on clear standards, code review, and a steady delivery rhythm
- Integration and compliance work is moving forward First year
- Subcraft has a growing base of paying merchants on a stable, scalable platform
- We can show merchants credible, well-measured recovery results
- You’ve helped hire the first full-time engineers and shaped how the team works
Why join:
- Join early, with real ownership over technology and product direction
- Work directly with the founding team on an AI-driven fintech platform
- Solve hard problems where AI, payments, and subscription commerce meet
- Shape the engineering culture, architecture, and future team Compensation and how to apply
Compensation: A mix of cash and equity, structured individually based on experience and fit.
Employment type: Full-time
To apply: Send your resume, LinkedIn, or GitHub, with a short introduction, to.
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JOB OVERVIEW
Experience level
Director
Location
Madison, WI
Occupation
Software Developers
Industry
Software Publishers
Posted
today
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