Founding Product Engineer

Full-time · Long-term freelance contract (VAT ID), full-time hire conversion after the round · €60k–80k/year + 1% equity · Remote, Europe/Rome ±3h

About RankWit

RankWit is the AI search visibility platform built for travel. It monitors how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok answer the questions travelers actually ask, and measures how often a hotel or a destination shows up in those answers compared to its competitors. It then explains why it makes the cut or gets left out, turns that diagnosis into a prioritized list of actions, and produces the content that fills the gaps.

• €300k raised from angel investors and the Nana Bianca Hubble program
• €100k in sales in the first two months
• Raising a €2M round by the end of 2026

The role

We're looking for the first engineer hire who's going to work alongside the CTO, with the goal to own areas and work autonomously. You are going to start from the direction and the customer feedback, turn them into spec and ship it end to end.

Why join

• 1% equity in a company that already sells and is raising its next round.
• Real ownership. Once the direction is set, everything down to production is yours: specs, code, releases, pipelines and infrastructure.
• A codebase built for AI-assisted work. Written rules, docs next to every module, context on Linear: you and Claude Code are productive from day one.
• A concrete market. Travel and AI search, with customers already paying.
• No layers. You work directly with the founders, decisions take hours, not weeks.

What you'll own

• Turn a product direction or a vague need ("clients want to know when traffic drops") into a spec: problem, happy path, edge cases, what's out of scope.
• Decide trade-offs on your own and write down the why. Escalate only what changes scope or costs money.
• Push back, with a reason, when something doesn't add up.
• Measure what you shipped: is it used, did it fix the problem, what comes next.
• Own features from database to UI: Python (FastAPI, Celery), PostgreSQL, Next.js.
• Keep the codebase simple and the standards high: tests on real endpoints, clean lint, docs next to the code.
• Run the data pipelines: our job engine, its runs, failures and recoveries.
• Own infrastructure and releases: AWS, Docker, Terraform, zero-downtime deploys.

What we're looking for

• 1+ year of daily AI-assisted coding (Claude Code). You know where it shines and where it lies.
• You're not junior: you've shipped and run production software for years, front to back.
• Strong in both backend (Python, FastAPI, Celery, PostgreSQL) and frontend (Next.js, TypeScript).
• You've been on the hook for production: incidents, debugging under pressure, deploys, infrastructure (Linux, Docker, AWS).
• You've turned vague requests into specs that someone else, or an AI, could build from.
• Familiar with SEO/GEO, or genuinely curious about how AI engines pick their sources.
• You communicate proactively and in writing: short updates, decisions with the why, and you say early when something is going sideways.
• Based in a time zone within ±3 hours of Europe/Rome: we work on overlapping hours.
• Full-time availability.

Your first 60 days

• Day 20: you know the platform, the data model and how our customers use it. You ship features and fix production bugs, with a founder reviewing your code.
• Day 40: you write the specs and run the pipelines on your own. You merge without a founder review.
• Day 60: you own infrastructure and releases end to end. The founders set the direction and review outcomes, not code.

Process

• Application on LinkedIn: CV (PDF, one page max).
• Receive three questions to answer by email.
• 30-minute call with our CTO.
• Take-home exercise on a real request from our product (max 1 hour). Use AI the way you would at work.
• 90-minute call to walk through your exercise.
• Call with CEO and COO.
• Offer.