Founding Product Engineer

The foundation of the modern global economy is built on a dense network of counterparty trust and risk. In the past 50 years, companies have evolved from relying on a couple of wholesalers and vendors, to utilizing 100+ SaaS vendors, contract partners, and cloud providers. Since each counterparty has their own idiosyncratic internal processes and risk profiles, businesses end up spending millions of dollars and countless man-hours conducting due diligence.

Coverbase’s mission is to streamline this business-to-business assessment, reducing human toil, and allowing organizations to work together safely and reliably. We employ modern AI techniques to organize vast amounts of unstructured data and compare them against policies to identify key risks to the business.

We already serve customers across Fortune 500 companies in insurance, higher education, and finance — including five of the top 25 banks in the US.

Our proven leadership team brings deep experience:

• Clarence (CEO): Co-founder & former CTO of Unit21, a Series C fraud detection company that has raised ~$92M.

• Kao (CTO): Previously led the Stripe engineering team that launched Banking-as-a-Service.
  

We’ve raised $20M from world-class investors and our team of 12 have built important products at Google, Mapbox and Waymo.

We're seeking a Founding Product Engineer to develop foundational components of our product and anchor the culture and spirit of the team. We care more about slope than y-intercept. Formal education or prior domain knowledge is not strictly required, but a fierce can-do attitude and a desire to make something of yourself certainly is.

We're also looking for folks who care not just about their work, but the people around them—we're building a team that's as kind as it is talented.

You will take on some subset of the following:

• Design, build, and iterate on end-to-end web products that are robust and delight our users.

• Own the full development lifecycle, from brainstorming to deployment, ensuring platform scalability and reliability.

• Contribute across the stack, whether developing backend services (typed Python), frontend interfaces (React/Typescript), evolving our Postgres database layer, or shaping AWS infrastructure with Pulumi.

• Innovate on our AI systems—custom chunking algorithms, vector databases, and private LLMs—to deliver accurate, auditable assessments.

• Foster a constructive environment for code reviews, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.

• Strong foundational software engineering skills: efficient in your dev environment, confident with git, seasoned at debugging, and able to provide high-quality code reviews.

• Ability to thrive in a dynamic, early-stage startup environment.

• Immediate productivity in at least one area of our stack (React frontends, Python backends, AI systems, or AWS infrastructure).

• Strong product addressing a latent market demand: Our AI-driven platform is transforming third-party risk management (TPRM) for top-tier financial institutions. Customers describe it as “revolutionary” and “a joy to work with,” and we’re just getting started.

  Here is what customers are saying -- unprompted feedback:

  “This is a revolutionary product… Coverbase is the single biggest step forward in TPRM I’ve seen in my career.”

  “You’re flipping the entire program upside down, we completed the risk assessment in 1.5 days… would otherwise have taken at least 3 weeks.”

  “Love how responsive you are, it’s been a joy to work with you guys.”

• Founding-level Impact: As an early team member, you’ll shape not just the product but also our engineering culture and trajectory. Your contributions will directly influence our success and define how we grow.

• Collaborative Team: Join a tight-knit, mission-driven group that values kindness, creativity, and curiosity as much as expertise. You’ll work closely with the founders and an exceptional team of engineers.

• $140K to $220K base depending on experience and ability

• Meaningful founding equity in the company

• Health insurance

• 21 days of PTO

• In-person gatherings within the U.S. (travel covered) every 3-5 months. We’ll give plenty of notice for it, and cover flights and accommodation. We expect you to attend!

• 401(k) plan with 4% matching

Location: San Francisco, Hybrid
Reports to: CTO, Co-founder

Coverbase Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.