Founding Fullstack Engineer

About the role

As a Founding Engineer at Cardinal, you’ll help define and build the next generation of go-to-market infrastructure.

This is a systems-heavy role. You’ll work closely with customers to understand how GTM actually breaks today, shape product direction from first principles, and design core primitives at the frontier of GTM.

Excited to have you onboard! More info below:

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What You’ll Build

• Core GTM orchestration systems that coordinate actions across email, LinkedIn, and future channels with strong guarantees around correctness, timing, and state
• Distributed workflow engines for sequencing, retries, backoff, and recovery across millions of GTM events
• AI-assisted GTM primitives that help teams decide who to reach, when, and how — not just send messages
• Enterprise-grade infrastructure supporting real-time execution, analytics, and experimentation loops
• Internal developer platforms & tools — debuggers, dashboards, and state visualizations that make complex GTM systems observable
• Polished user interfaces that turn abstract system behavior into something founders and operators can reason about

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We’re Looking For

• 2–6 years of experience building production systems and user-facing products
• Strong systems thinking — you reason clearly about distributed systems, state machines, failure modes, idempotency, and performance
• Full-stack fluency with TypeScript, React, Node.js, and modern web infrastructure
• Comfort with ambiguity — you enjoy designing primitives before the category is fully defined
• Product instinct — you talk to users, identify leverage points, and ship systems that change behavior
• High agency — you don’t wait for specs; you define them

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Bonus Points

• Experience with workflow engines, queues, or event-driven architectures
• Background in growth infrastructure, messaging systems, or developer platforms
• Familiarity with AI/LLMs, prompt design, evals, or AI-augmented UX
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup or building category-defining tools
• Strong opinions on how modern GTM should work — and the ability to encode them in systems

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What We Offer

• Meaningful equity in a company defining a new GTM category
• Direct leverage — the systems you build will shape how modern companies grow
• Fast feedback loops with founders and power users
• Competitive compensation — $160K–$235K base + equity
• Full benefits — health, dental, vision, unlimited PTO
• San Francisco office — build alongside the founding team

**Background:**
Founders Jianna Liu and Devi Jha are Harvard and MIT alums. They were part of YC S23, where they built and sold an energy software company (Leafpress) to Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) — scaling revenue almost entirely through cold email and LinkedIn.

Now, Cardinal works with YC-backed and high-growth companies to turn GTM from guesswork into infrastructure.

We’re early, opinionated, and operating at the frontier of how companies grow.