[Remote] Founding Software Engineer (AI)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Otium builds software for manufacturers, including tools that help production teams create and adjust weekly schedules and identify orders needing attention. The Founding Software Engineer will work directly with the founder and customers to turn the initial implementation into a reusable product, owning work across the interface, backend, data, integrations, internal tools, and AI behavior.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the product across its interface, backend, data, and AI behavior
• Work directly with schedulers, operators, and company leaders to understand their workflows
• Make product and technical decisions without waiting for a complete specification
• Ship early versions, observe how people use them, and revise them
• Help decide what should become part of the core product and what should remain customer-specific
• Establish the engineering practices that future hires will inherit

Skills

• • Remote within the United States
• • Full-time
• • You should be comfortable making a reasonable decision, explaining it, and changing course when the evidence does
• You care about what you have chosen to build
• We care that you took it far enough for someone else to use it and can explain what you learned
• • You can take ownership of an unclear problem and keep moving
• • You have enough product sense to notice when software is technically correct but unpleasant or confusing to use
• • You can explain technical decisions to people who do not work in software
• • You use Claude Code, Codex, or similar tools as part of how you build
• • You are curious about how manufacturers actually operate
• • You care where the work lands after it ships
• You should have strong full-stack software engineering fundamentals
• Our current work is largely TypeScript and React/Next.js, but exact stack overlap is less important than your ability to learn and ship
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States
• Otium is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship for this role
• You may have started a company, shipped a side project, automated something at work, or built a tool because a problem kept bothering you
• The project does not need to be large
• A computer science degree is useful, but shipped work tells us more
• Experience with some of the following would be useful:
• • Building AI features that call tools or work over company data
• • Designing APIs and working with relational databases
• • Structured model output, evaluations, retrieval, or agent workflows
• • Integrating with old or imperfect business systems
• • Deploying and maintaining software used by real customers
• • Making sensible tradeoffs around cost, latency, and reliability

Benefits

• Equity: 1%-2%
• Direct influence over the product and technical direction
• Regular access to the people using what you build
• A serious budget for models, coding agents, and development tools
• The opportunity to help choose future engineers and shape how the team works
• Remote within the United States

Company Overview