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Posted 15 August, 2026

Software Engineer

Ploy
San Francisco, CA, US Full Time

Job Description

About Ploy

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Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.

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We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.

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The role

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As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.

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What you’ll do

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    Build 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.

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    Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.

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    Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.

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    Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.

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    Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.

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    Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on-call hygiene.

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    Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.

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What we’re looking forMust-haves

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    Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).

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    Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end + backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.

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    Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.

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    Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.

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    Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.

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Nice-to-haves

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    Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).

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    Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).

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    Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.

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    Experience in the web and marketing space

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How we work

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    Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.

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    Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.

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    Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.

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    We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.

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