Location: Denver, CO (Hybrid)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Department: Product & Engineering
Work Authorization: Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future visa sponsorship. TrueSpace cannot provide visa sponsorship at this time.
What TrueSpace Does
TrueSpace is building a platform to measure and achieve scale-readiness for founders of second-stage businesses – founders that are past the startup phase but not yet built for scale. Most established companies don’t fail because of lack of ambition; they stall because complexity outpaces structure.
We’re building TrueScore (a scale-readiness scoring system) and Trudy Pro (an AI-powered strategic advisor). This isn’t a dashboard; it’s infrastructure for decision-making at the leadership level.
What You’d Work On
You’d build the product end-to-end, working directly with our CTO and Head of Design. This is a first-engineer role. You won’t just implement a spec, you’ll shape how things get built.
- Signup and billing workflows (Stripe)
- Organization admin, user management, and checkpoint workflows
- LLM-powered chat interface (Trudy) and engagement features
- Database design, migrations, and improvements
- Testing, CI/CD, and AWS infrastructure
- A Python-based AI agent layer (FastAPI) that powers Trudy
The Stack & What We Care About
We’re on Laravel/PHP with MySQL on AWS, and we’re bringing in React where it improves the experience or development speed. You don’t need Laravel experience. If you’ve built and shipped real things for the web in Rails, Django, Node, or any other framework, and you can navigate an unfamiliar codebase, that’s what matters. Web fundamentals transfer across frameworks. We care about those fundamentals.
- Strong JavaScript skills, since we’re building toward React on the frontend
- Server-side web development experience in any framework
- Solid grasp of HTTP, APIs, database design, and how the pieces fit together
- Engineering judgment: finding the minimal change that solves the real problem, knowing good design from bad, thinking about how changes affect the rest of the system
Useful additions: Python (we have an AI agent service in FastAPI), Stripe integration experience, comfort with AWS (we’re serverless on Lambda), Postgres experience (migration from MySQL is planned).
How We Think About LLMs
We use them for writing code, generating tests, drafting specs and copy, working through design problems. We expect you to use them too.
We also expect you to understand what’s happening without them. How does a request get from a browser to a server and back? What is an API call actually doing? Is it secure, and why? Why is this query slow?
LLMs will help you write code faster. They won’t tell you whether it’s the right code to write.
How We Work
- Ship small changes, get feedback, and correct course
- One product team: CEO, COO, CTO, Design, and Engineering share goals and decisions
- Find bottlenecks and remove them
- A misaligned button is fine; a data leak is not
Who We’re Looking For
We’re hiring 1-2 engineers. We care about judgment, clear thinking, and motivation, not credentials, pedigree, or years-of-experience thresholds.
Two profiles we’re especially drawn to:
A junior developer who’s hungry. You’ve been building projects, side work, freelance, bootcamp work, whatever, and you’re ready for real ownership in a real product. You learn fast, you ask good questions, and you want to be great at this, not just employed.
A senior developer who’s been overlooked. Maybe you’re self-taught, or spent years at a company nobody’s heard of, or your background doesn’t look like what recruiters are trained to scan for. You’re good at what you do. You want a place that will notice.
Compensation
- Early-career: $90,000–$120,000
- Mid-level: $120,000–$160,000
- Senior / founding engineer: $160,000–$210,000
Equity available. Benefits include PTO, Medical, dental and vision insurance, Term life insurance, Short and long-term disability insurance, and 401(k) match up to 4%.
Why This Role
- Shape the product and the engineering culture as an early technical hire
- Work across the full stack, including frontend, backend, data, agentic AI frameworks, and observability, and then get better at all of it
- Work directly with the entire company: CEO, COO, CTO, and Head of Design
- Build something that helps real businesses grow. Do the kind of work that makes companies and the people in them better
How to Apply
Send us a note at careers@truespace.com with whatever you think shows your work best: a GitHub profile, a project you’re proud of, or a few paragraphs about what you’ve built. No cover letter template required.
