Founding Engineer

ABOUT SHARE

Share is a venture-backed internet infrastructure network building Africa’s backbone. The company aggregates underutilised telecom infrastructure, fiber, subsea cables, and data centers, and provides ISPs with scalable access to bandwidth without traditional upfront costs. Through an open-access model, local internet providers can deliver dramatically faster speeds to their subscribers without raising their own costs.

The platform team builds the software that makes this work: billing, payments, subscriber management, RADIUS-based network authentication, and integrations with ISP billing systems and mobile money providers. We are replacing legacy, non-API systems with a modern API platform, and real money is already flowing through the system. This is a small, high-intensity engineering team building core infrastructure under real deadlines. You will own entire domains, not tickets.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Founding Engineer to take ownership of core platform architecture as we rebuild for a system roughly 50x the scale of what we had before. You'll design and scale distributed systems from scratch (this is deep systems-architecture work, not feature development on an existing system.) You will work directly with the Head of Development and a small team of engineers to ship production systems operating at global scale.

Non-negotiable

- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with real, hands-on ownership of designing and scaling a production system from scratch. You can describe specific production incidents at scale (what broke, why, and what you changed) not just system-design-interview theory.

- Deep TypeScript/Node.js expertise. You should be able to design a NestJS microservice from scratch, not just work in one.

- Strong PostgreSQL skills. You can design schemas for complex, high-throughput production data, write migrations, and reason about transaction isolation and locking.

- Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar). You understand the difference between request-reply and fire-and-forget patterns and when to use each.

- You ship. You can take a spec document and turn it into production code without waiting for someone to break it into small tasks.

Nice to have, not required: prior fintech/payments experience or blockchain/distributed-ledger exposure

AI-AUGMENTED ENGINEERING (REQUIRED MINDSET)

We expect every engineer at Share to use AI tools as a daily part of their workflow. This is how we operate. Our entire project planning, specification, and documentation process runs through AI-assisted sessions. Our codebase includes AI-readable context files. We use Claude for architecture decisions, code review, spec generation, and technical writing.

What this means for you:

- You already use AI coding assistants (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) daily and can articulate how they change your workflow.

- You are comfortable working with AI-generated specifications and can critically evaluate them, push back where they are wrong, and extend them where they are incomplete.

- You see AI as a force multiplier that lets a small team operate at the capacity of a much larger one. You are not threatened by it; you are faster because of it.

- You are willing to contribute to improving our AI-assisted workflows

COMPENSATION & DETAILS:

- Competitive Salary & Equity package

- Additional Benefits

- Paid Business Travel when needed

- Ownership in a venture-backed early stage startup building the future of physical and digital infrastructure in Africa