Founding Engineer (equity)

At enum, we're building our the European cloud platform on bare metal hardware. Not a wrapper around hyperscalers, not a managed Kubernetes reseller, not sovereignty marketing on someone else's infrastructure. We design, operate, and continuously improve the full stack: compute, Kubernetes, storage, and networking. Bare metal to API.

We have paying customers, a growing platform, and a small team that builds fast. What we're missing is someone who's built large-scale cloud infrastructure before, someone who already built the things we're building for the first time.

We're looking for a Founding Engineer to join as the third member of our core engineering team. You'll work directly with the founder (Max) and the core engineering team, make architecture decisions that shape the platform for years, and write the Go and Rust code to back them up.

You'll get equity, ownership, and the kind of impact that's impossible at a company with layers between you and production.

Tasks

• Design and evolve core platform infrastructure: compute, storage, networking, tenant isolation
• Write production Go for our control plane, reconcilers, and API services
• Work on distributed storage architecture and scaling (Ceph/RADOS)
• Work on network design for multi-tenant isolation and multi-region expansion
• Work on Kubernetes control plane internals and cluster lifecycle management
• Review and challenge what we've built so far, tell us what's fragile, what won't scale, and what needs to change before it's too late
• Mentor a strong engineer who's learning fast but hasn't operated infrastructure at this scale before
• Help us make architecture decisions that hold up under growth, not just under demo load
• Write Engineering Requirement Documents to take something from idea, to defined tasks, to implementation, to monitoring its success

This is not a "maintain the cluster" gig.

We're not looking for someone to watch dashboards or follow runbooks.

We need someone who can go from whiteboard to Go code to production and own the result.

Requirements

• Worked at a cloud provider, hosting company, or large-scale infrastructure operation, not on top of one, inside one
• Built application-level infrastructure code (Go, Rust, gRPC, reconcilers, APIs)
• Delivered projects 0→N. Lead it, scaled it, seen your "brilliant solutions" become tech debt, replaced them
• Designed systems that survived growth, multi-tenant, multi-region, high availability, failure-domain thinking
• Communicated clearly using docs, RFCs, or architecture decision records to break up and deliver large tasks
• Been on-call and know what it means to own production
• Operated with agency and urgency
• Built the confidence to say no to 99% of things, and the grit to deliver the 1% that matter
• Distributed storage in production (Ceph)
• Network architecture at fabric level (EVPN/VXLAN, BGP, Anycast, multi-tenant network design)
• Kubernetes internals: control plane, CNI, multi-tenancy, not just Helm charts
• Infrastructure software in Go or Rust: control planes, reconcilers, platform tooling
• Bare metal operations, PXE, hardware lifecycle, datacenter environments

Benefits

• Founding Engineer title. You're not employee #47. You're building this from day one.
• VSOP equity participation.
• Competitive salary. Below BigCorp, honest about it. The tradeoff is ownership, equity and impact.
• Remote first within EU. We care about what you build, not where you sit. Working language is English, German is a plus.
• Hardware of your choice.
• No layers. You talk to the founder, you write code, it ships. That's it.
• Bootstrapped. We built this with our own money, our own hardware, and paying customers. No VC dependencies, no burn-rate panic. Fundraising is a strategic next step, not a survival one.
• Ambitious mission. We're not building another SaaS tool. We're building the European public cloud platform to compete with hyperscalers. Few companies let you work on problems at this scope.

We're a startup. That changes things.

• There's no "platform team" you're joining. You are the platform team, together with the founder. There's no one to escalate to. You own it.
• We ship fast. Architecture decisions go from whiteboard to production in days, not quarters. If that sounds stressful rather than exciting, this isn't the role.
• We're building something that doesn't exist yet: A European public cloud that's technically competitive with the hyperscalers. That means ambiguity, unknowns, and decisions with incomplete information. Constantly.
• We don't do Jira. We don't do daily standups. We don't do permission chains. We talk, we decide, we build.
• You'll be on-call. At this stage, everyone is. If production breaks at 2am, we fix it. That's the deal.
• We're honest about where we are: early, lean, in production with paying customers, and building the foundation for something much bigger. If you need structure, process, and a 50-page onboarding doc, we're not there yet.