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Founding Engineer

Fernstone· Engineering
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New York City, NY$120k - $180kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Founding engineer role at Fernstone, an AI-native insurance brokerage. You’ll be the second engineering hire, owning critical systems, shaping technical direction, and building across the stack with a focus on practical AI and reliable workflows.

Responsibilities

  • Own outcomes: partner with our operations team to learn how insurance work gets done, identify the biggest opportunities, and decide what to build.
  • Build across the stack: Design and build complete features across the interface, application logic, data model, and infrastructure.
  • Engineer for the real world: Create reliable workflows where accuracy matters, outside systems fail, and events may unfold over days or weeks
  • Develop practical AI: Build systems that interpret information, automate multi-step work, and recognize when a person needs to step in.

Qualifications

  • 2+ YOE
  • You’ve shipped and maintained production software that people depend on.
  • You can take an ambiguous business problem, ask good questions, and turn it into a focused solution.
  • You have strong backend and relational database fundamentals, and you’re comfortable building a polished frontend.
  • You think carefully about data correctness, failure handling, and how systems behave after deployment.
  • You have practical experience building with language models, including evaluating their output and handling mistakes.
  • You use AI development tools effectively and take responsibility for understanding, reviewing, and debugging the code you ship.

Skills

Required:Backend developmentFrontend developmentData correctness and failure handlingLanguage model / AI experience
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Fernstone

AI-powered insurance brokerage for businesses.

Fernstone is an AI-powered insurance brokerage for businesses. We are competing with the 40K insurance brokers that sell $500B in commercial premium each year. Before starting Fernstone, Luke and James met at Traba (Series A) when they started on the same day. James created and led Traba’s Enterprise function, growing it to 25% of company revenue. Luke led a Growth team, closing some of Traba’s largest customers like JB Hunt and Kimberly Clark. Bryant, James’ classmate from high school, was a Software Engineer at Sentilink and Google.

artificial-intelligencefintechinsurance
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