Founding Engineer
Thera
New York · $100k–$250k a year · Posted November 17, 2025
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About the job
🚀 FOUNDING ENGINEER, THERA (NYC)
Thera is building the financial OS for modern SMBs. Payroll, payments, treasury, spend, and accounting in one ecosystem that actually works end-to-end.
We're looking for our first NYC-based Founding Engineer to help scale the systems powering global payroll and money movement, work alongside our existing engineering team in India, and seed our in-person engineering culture from day one.
This is a true founding role. You'll be in the code, owning large pieces of the product, and working directly with the CEO.
📍 NYC, 5 days/week
Why we started Thera
Our founders saw firsthand how broken SMB payroll and finance had become. The average SMB stitches together 5+ tools just to pay people, move money, and close their books. We started Thera to collapse that fragmented stack into a single source of truth.
Backed by YC, 10X Founders, Zillionize, and Amino Capital.
What you'll own
- Core systems powering global payroll and money movement
- Large pieces of the product, end-to-end
- Helping lead our existing engineering team of 5+ in India
- Building our in-person engineering presence in NYC from scratch
- Direct partnership with the CEO and product team
Your first 90 days
30 days
- Ship a meaningful improvement or net-new feature on the spend product
- Get deep with the product team and the India engineering team
60 days
- Map out future builds across the roadmap
- Start leading product meetings
90 days
- Ship autonomously across at least one product surface
- Help build out our NYC in-person engineering culture
- Influence how we hire the next wave of engineers
About you
- 3 to 7+ years building and shipping production systems
- You thrive in ambiguity, move extremely fast, and care deeply about craft
- Comfortable owning features end-to-end from zero to one
- Bias toward action, simple solutions, and high standards
- Comfortable working with a distributed team across time zones
Stack today: TypeScript + Java/Kotlin
Not a fit if
- You want a pure management role
- You avoid ambiguity or messy real-world systems
- You're not willing to be in-person in NYC
Why Thera
- Huge ownership and meaningful equity
- Direct impact on product and culture
- A chance to build one of the most important fintech platforms of the next decade
Read more about our cultural principles: https://www.getthera.com/principles