Software Engineer

About this role

Software Engineer

• Engineering
• San Francisco
• Hybrid
• Full-time

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.

Software Engineer

Team : Engineering

Location : San Francisco

Workplace : Hybrid

Type : Full-time

Links beat resumes. We read every application.

Apply

Software Engineer · San Francisco · Hybrid

Your application goes straight to our hiring team in Ashby. Links to things you’ve built help us most.

Prefer Ashby? Apply there

Resume\*

Are you located in San Francisco, CA or willing to relocate to San Francisco Bay Area? \*

By applying you agree to our Privacy Policy.