Software Engineer

About this role

Software Engineer

Ploy

San FranciscoFull TimeJuly 7, 2026

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Job Description

ABOUT PLOY

Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.

We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.

THE ROLE

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Build 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.
• Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.
• Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.
• Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.
• Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on-call hygiene.
• Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

MUST-HAVES

• Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).
• Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end + backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.
• Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.
• Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.
• Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.

NICE-TO-HAVES

• Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).
• Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).
• Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.
• Experience in the web and marketing space

HOW WE WORK

• Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.
• Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.
• Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.
• We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.