Founding Platform Engineer

Contract engagement · Remote
Engagement.
Independent contractor, full-time (40 hrs/wk)
Remote from Latin America or Eastern Europe
Minimum 4 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern (9am–1pm ET)
Paid 2-week trial project, then a 90-day initial term converting to an ongoing monthly engagement
Rate: $60–$85/hr depending on region and depth
About Caliber
Caliber is an inbound lead-generation and call-routing platform serving insurance, energy, home internet and education verticals. It ingests leads from paid media and partner sources, runs a WebRTC softphone and dialer engine for live agents, routes calls and data posts to buyers under real-time eligibility rules, and closes the loop with revenue attribution back to the ad platforms. The stack is TypeScript end to end: Next.js 14 (App Router) on Vercel, Supabase Postgres with RLS, a Node dialer engine and background worker on Fly.io, Telnyx for voice and SMS, and Grafana Cloud for observability. The codebase was built at speed by the founder with heavy use of AI-assisted development (Claude Code). You will be the first engineer to own it alongside him, and the person who makes it safe for a team to change.
The job, in order
Your first 60 days are about safety, not features. The founder keeps building at today's pace; you make sure what ships cannot take down a system that routes paid calls every hour.
Days 1–30: review every change. Stand up the environment ladder — local Supabase docker, Vercel preview per PR, a staging Supabase branch and staging Fly apps for the engine and worker. Automate migration application and drift detection so nothing is applied by hand.
Days 30–60: gated deploys through GitHub Actions with a tested rollback for the engine; alert routing by severity with runbooks; a written on/off-boarding and access checklist so later hires can be added cleanly.
Day 60 onward: own the codebase. Architecture decisions, feature delivery across dashboard, API, schema, worker jobs and buyer integrations, and onboarding of the reliability and QA engineers who will take the operational load you set up.
Ongoing responsibilities
Code review on every PR and the engineering standards the team works to: branching, typed validators, migrations discipline, test expectations.
Ship features end to end: routing and eligibility rules, reporting pages, partner postbacks, SMS flows, ad-platform conversion uploads.
Drive AI-assisted development as the default workflow: scope tasks precisely, run Claude Code against them, review and harden the output, and keep the shared context (CLAUDE.md, project memory, runbooks) current.
Triage and fix production bugs across ingest, dedupe and consent gates, call routing, transfer and failover, delivery and attribution.
Turn the founder's product direction into technical designs and phased plans, and push back when a request will hurt reliability.
Must have
7+ years building production web applications; 3+ years as the most senior engineer on a small team.
Expert TypeScript and Node; deep Next.js App Router experience (server components, server actions, middleware, caching traps).
Strong Postgres: schema design, indexes, migrations, row-level security, query performance on tables with tens of millions of rows. Supabase strongly preferred.
You have personally set up, for a production system: CI/CD with gated deploys and rollback, a staging environment, and automated migrations. Fly.io or a comparable PaaS, Docker, GitHub Actions.
Daily, fluent use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor or similar) and the judgment to review what they produce.
Experience owning a system where bugs cost money in real time — adtech, fintech, telecom, marketplaces.
Clear written English; you write the design doc, the PR description and the post-mortem.
Nice to have
Telephony or messaging: Telnyx, Twilio, SIP, WebRTC, 10DLC, dialer or call-center systems.
Performance marketing or lead-gen: ping/post, Ringba-style routing, offline conversions to Google and Microsoft Ads, TCPA and consent handling.
Prometheus/Grafana alerting and SLOs; Vitest and Playwright.
How we'll evaluate
Written screen (30 min): one real Caliber failure mode and how you would find it; one on how you use AI coding tools day to day.
45-minute technical conversation walking through one Caliber subsystem from a written description, then how you would take a single-environment, hand-deployed Fly + Supabase system to a gated pipeline in 30 days.
Paid 2-week trial: stand up preview + staging for the worker app with a documented rollback, without production access, and ship one scoped backlog ticket through it as a PR with tests and a runbook.
Reference check with a founder or CTO you reported to.
How to apply
Send a short note on the system you have owned that most resembles Caliber, a link to code or a write-up you are proud of, and your rate and availability. We reply to everyone who completes the written screen.

Work arrangement
Yes