Founding Engineer

Location: Gurgaon - WeWork, Cybercity (in-person, 6 days)
Type: Full-time · Founding team
Compensation: ₹15 LPA + meaningful equity (0.5–2%)
About Switch
Businesses in India lose money every day someone doesn't show up. A restaurant short two waiters on a Friday night, a warehouse missing four loaders before a festive spike, a store with no one to run the counter - the current fix is a WhatsApp group, an agency that takes a cut and disappears, or the owner working the floor themselves.
Switch is building the layer that fixes this. Shops, restaurants, warehouses, offices, and event venues book Aadhaar-verified staff - helpers, guards, cooks, drivers, riders, housekeeping, event crew - in three taps, often deployed the same day. No advance, replacement guaranteed, clean invoices. On the other side, we give workers real, repeat, dignified income instead of standing at a labour chowk hoping for a day's work.
We're live in Gurgaon, running real shifts for real businesses. We're small, pre-seed, and moving fast.
The role
You'd be our first engineer. Not the first engineer on a team - the engineering team.
Today a lot of Switch runs on human effort: matching, confirmations, replacements, and support all lean on the ops team and WhatsApp. That's the right way to start and the wrong way to scale. Your job is to turn what ops does by hand into software that does it in seconds, and to build the product surface - worker app, business app, internal tools - that lets us go from one city to many.
You will write the code, choose the stack, ship it, and be on the hook when it breaks at 9pm on a Saturday during someone's dinner rush. In return you get real ownership of the technical direction and a front-row seat to everything else: pricing, ops, hiring, fundraising.
What you'll actually build (first 6 months)
Matching engine. Turn a booking into the right worker — availability, location, skill, reliability history, price - fast enough that "same day" becomes "same hour."
Worker app. Shift discovery, one-tap accept, check-in/check-out with geofencing, attendance proof, payouts and earnings history.
Business app + web. Booking flow, live shift status, replacements, subscription management, GST-clean invoicing.
Ops console. The internal tool that lets one ops person run what currently takes three - exception queues, no-show detection and auto-replacement, escalations.
Payments and payouts. Collections, worker payouts, reconciliation, refunds - via UPI and standard PGs.
Trust infrastructure. Aadhaar/KYC verification flows, background-check pipeline, ratings, fraud and proxy-attendance detection.
You're probably a fit if you
Have 2-6 years shipping production software, and can point at systems you built end-to-end - schema through UI - that real users depended on.
Are genuinely full-stack: comfortable in a backend language and framework of your choice, a modern frontend, a mobile framework (React Native / Flutter / native), SQL, and enough AWS/GCP to run it all without a DevOps hire.
Have built for scrappy, real-world conditions: flaky networks, ₹8,000 Android phones, users who won't read instructions, workflows that live in Hindi and WhatsApp.
Ship fast and ruthlessly scope. You know which corners are safe to cut at pre-seed and which ones will burn you.
Will sit with an ops teammate for an afternoon, watch them do a job manually, and go build the thing that deletes it.
Want to be in the room. This is an in-person role - the speed comes from the whiteboard, the desk next to you, and the field visits.
Nice to have, not required
Marketplace, gig-economy, logistics, or on-demand experience (Zomato/Swiggy/Urban Company/Rapido/Porter-shaped problems).
Payments, UPI, KYC, or fintech integration work.
Blue-collar or Bharat-focused products; vernacular UX.
You've been early at a startup before and know what year one really feels like.
The honest part
Pre-seed means uncertainty. Some of what you build will be thrown away. You'll do things that aren't engineering - sit in on sales calls, go to a client's warehouse at 7am, help onboard workers. There is no platform team, no on-call rotation, no one to hand a bug to. Runway is finite and the equity is a bet, not a guarantee.
If that reads as a warning, this isn't your role. If it reads as the interesting part, keep going.
What we offer
Competitive cash for a pre-seed startup, plus founding-level equity.
Full technical ownership - stack, architecture, hiring the team under you.
Direct work with the founders, no layers.
Health insurance and a laptop of your choosing.
A product where you can watch the impact the same week you ship it - in shifts filled, and in what a worker took home.
How to apply
Email hr@switchlocally.com with the subject "Founding Engineer" and include:
Your GitHub, portfolio, or the most interesting thing you've shipped - and what your specific contribution was.
A short answer: You have one week and no data science team. How would you decide which worker to send to a booking? A paragraph is plenty. We care about how you think, not the right answer.
Anything you've built that people outside your company actually used.
We move fast: intro call, a paid take-home or a day working with us on a real problem, founder conversation, offer. Typically under two weeks.

Work arrangement
No