Founding Software Engineer

Founding Engineer | Bustem

Location: New York City (In Office)

About:

At Bustem , we’re building AI powered brand protection for eCommerce brands. We protect brands from fake listings, impersonation, and copycats across marketplaces, social platforms, and the open web, turning what used to be a messy, manual process into something fast, systematic, and effective.

In less than twelve months, we’ve scaled to over $3M in revenue and partnered with more than 150 top e-commerce brands, including Comfrt Clothing, Plunge, Primal Queen, and Jones Road Beauty. We’re profitable, growing quickly, and haven’t raised a dollar.

We’re now hiring early team members to help build the next phase of Bustem. This is a rare chance to join a company that already has strong product-market fit, real traction, and momentum, while still being early enough to shape the product, the systems, and the culture. If you like ownership, speed, and building things that actually ship and matter, you’ll feel at home here.

The Role

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to help us build the technical backbone of Bustem.

Your North Star: build scalable, reliable systems that detect and remove counterfeit activity faster and more effectively than our brand protection team.

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll be working on core infrastructure and product systems that directly power our customers’ results. You’ll have real ownership, minimal process overhead, and the ability to design and ship end-to-end systems, not just small pieces of them.

This role is for someone who likes autonomy, ambiguity, and responsibility. You’ll be expected to think deeply about architecture, move quickly, and make good tradeoffs without needing constant direction.

What You’ll Work On

You’ll spend the majority of your time across two core initiatives:

1. Real-Time Infringer Detection

• Build and scale Bustem’s AI-powered web scraping and detection systems
• Improve speed, reliability, and coverage across marketplaces, social platforms, and the open web
• Design systems that can detect new infringers as they appear, in real time
• Work with large volumes of data and constantly changing external environments

2. Autonomous Enforcement & Reporting

• Build and evolve Bustem’s autonomous enforcement agents
• Enable automated reporting of infringers to platforms at scale
• Design workflows that can handle hundreds of infringers across hundreds of clients simultaneously
• Improve accuracy, success rates, and throughput of enforcement actions

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable internal APIs and backend systems
• Own features end-to-end: from architecture to implementation to production
• Work primarily with Next.js, Postgres, and modern backend infrastructure
• Leverage LLMs and automation to move faster and reduce manual work
• Collaborate closely with product, ops, and customer-facing teams
• Make pragmatic technical decisions that balance speed, quality, and scale
• Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and maintainability

What We’re Looking For

• 3 - 7 years of experience as a software engineer, ideally in a startup or high-growth environment.
• Strong experience with Next.js and Postgres
• Experience building scalable internal APIs and backend systems
• Comfort working with little supervision and a high degree of ownership
• Ability to take vague problems and turn them into shipped solutions
• Adept at using LLMs and AI tooling to move faster and build smarter systems

Nice to Have

• Experience working on large-scale or high-traffic systems
• Background in scraping, data pipelines, automation, or distributed systems
• Experience in eCommerce, marketplaces, or platform integrations

We value people who can build complete systems. If you’ve worked at big tech, that’s great, but what matters most is your ability to design, own, and ship meaningful systems independently.

Why Join Bustem

• Build core systems that directly drive customer value and revenue
• Real ownership and influence over technical direction
• Work directly with the founding team
• No legacy code, no heavy process, no endless meetings
• A profitable company with real traction and momentum