Founding Engineer

What Join us in building a new generation of financial services. Vahva's belief is simple: financial services work best when customers' and companies' interests are fully aligned. We're starting with insurance, because we think it's one of the clearest places to prove that financial services can be done differently, and better. Insurance is our starting point, not our end goal. Why us Vahva is a Finnish fintech company built to put customers first, starting with how insurance works. We see insurance as a modern financial product, not a legacy category to maintain. Insurance and cashback are the beginning of a long, healthy customer relationship, one we build our wider portfolio of products around. We're a seed-stage company, which means your voice shapes where we go next. You'll have real influence over decisions and over our customers' lives. We're building the founding team now. Join us. What you'll do Build Vahva's consumer platform from the ground up, working side by side with the founder. You are the founding engineer in a growth-stage company bringing a new kind of insurance concept to market, first in Finland under the Vahva brand. Ship product end-to-end: design, implement, deploy, and operate the services behind our cashback and insurance products (vahva.fi), which reward customers with real money for claim-free months, and the car-insurance products the platform grows into. Shape the architecture of a platform that has to be reliable, secure, and scalable in a regulated industry, and ready to expand from Finland to the Nordics and beyond. Take AI-first engineering from idea to practice: build AI into the platform and into how we work, from the ground up rather than bolted on afterward. Set the engineering culture and lay the foundations the future team will build on: how we build, test, ship, and run software. Work openly and close to our earliest users, who help develop the service with us; what they experience each month is the direct result of what you ship. What we look for A senior product engineer who has built and run production systems end-to-end and is comfortable being the one who makes it work, from API design through distributed and event-driven architectures to operating enterprise-grade, cloud-native systems in production. Experience taking an early-stage product from zero to launch: you make pragmatic calls, cut the right corners, and keep quality where it matters. An AI-native way of building: AI-assisted development tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar coding agents) are already part of how you work, and you've designed, built, or orchestrated AI agents and agentic workflows, with a solid grasp of prompt and context engineering, RAG patterns, tool-calling agents, and multi-agent systems. The foundations that let a small team ship fast and safely: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and automated deployments, and a working command of observability, security engineering, and cloud governance. An ownership mindset: you want the responsibility and the upside of a founding role, not a ticket queue. You take end-to-end responsibility for outcomes, from delivery quality and reliability to long-term maintainability, and you create leverage for every engineer who joins after you. Care for the trust our product runs on: money, insurance, and personal data demand security and correctness. Experience with fintech or other regulated domains is a clear advantage. Fluent English; Finnish is a strong plus in a product built first for the Finnish market. Technologies Applicants are expected to have knowledge of: TypeScript Node.js React PostgreSQL Building cloud-based B2C products AI engineering, applied from the ground up Where we are today We're moving from pre-launch to launch and are now onboarding our first paying customers. This is a rare opportunity to join with zero technical legacy: you'll define how things are truly done, together with our earliest customers. How to apply Apply with the form below: name, email, phone and CV. In your CV or cover note, tell us about something you've built and shipped end-to-end: what you chose, what you cut, and how it ran in production. Total compensation is competitive for a founding role, and equity in the company is available on top of salary. Process CV review. Although we are an AI-native company, people review the CVs. AI doesn't. Interview with the founder and the founding team Role-specific test in a real environment: real code, real data, real constraints Joining the company