Founding Engineer

JD For Founding Engineer - Web & Mobile Apps Architecture

About WorkElate WorkElate is building the AI-native office suite, one orchestration layer underneath docs, sheets, mail, chat, tasks, boards, and forms, designed AI-first rather than retrofitted with plugins on top of decade-old software. Our AI & WAO (Work Action Orchestration) engine turns plain-language intent into multi-step execution across every surface, so teams plan less and ship more. We're a founding-stage team building the infrastructure layer that the rest of the company and eventually every WorkElate customer will be built on.

The mission An office suite lives or dies on its editing experience. We need a founding engineer who has built or is obsessed with building the kind of apps that make Notion, Linear, Figma, and Google Workspace feel inevitable in retrospect.

You will design and lead the document model that powers WorkElate Mail, Chat, Docs, Sheets, Presentations, Whiteboard, and Forms. One model, many surfaces. Real-time collaborative. Diff-able. Versioned. AI-addressable. Fast on a laptop in Bengaluru on a flaky 4G connection. What you'll own

• The core document model and CRDT/OT architecture across all editing surfaces.
• Real-time multiplayer infrastructure: presence, cursors, conflict resolution, offline-first sync.
• The plugin/block architecture that lets every surface (doc, sheet, slide, board) be composed from shared primitives.
• Performance and reliability budgets every keystroke, every collaborator, every device.
• The interfaces AI agents use to read, mutate, and reason over documents.
• Production frontends for 2–3 surfaces at any given time (Docs, Mail, Tasks, Hub, etc.).

Who we're looking for

• 5+ years building production webapps using MERN(or parallels), strong CSS fundamentals, editor or collaboration systems (ProseMirror, Lexical, Slate, Y.js, Automerge, OT engines, etc.) are recommended.
• Deep understanding of CRDTs or operational transforms in production at scale.
• You have shipped something with hundreds of thousands of concurrent edits and can talk about the failure modes that taught you the most.
• Strong systems thinking - you reason in invariants, not just code paths.
• Obsession with detail. You have argued passionately about a 100ms animation curve and been right.
• You write code that others want to read.

Bonus signals

• Experience at Notion, Figma, Linear, Google Docs, Coda, Airtable, Quip, or similar.
• Open-source contributions to editor or sync libraries.
• You have an opinion about why Google Docs' editor architecture has held it back for the AI era.
• Built or contributed to a popular UI library, framework, or developer tool.
• Experience at companies known for frontend craft (Linear, Vercel, Stripe, Figma, Arc, Raycast, Notion, etc.).
• Comfortable in WebGL/Canvas, useful for the Whiteboard surface.

First 90 days

• Day 30 - Clean Architectural spec for the unified WorkElate document model, all apps operating smoothly for a small team of 20.
• Day 60 - Multi-user 5-6 apps surface working end-to-end with concurrent editors and offline reconciliation.
• Day 90 - Implement the second surface in all apps running on the same model, demonstrating the architecture's leverage.

Compensation Founding equity 1.5–3.0%. Cash compensation was discussed in the first call and benchmarked to your geography and current package. We are not the highest-cash offer you will get ( 40-50K). We intend to be the highest-equity, highest-leverage one.

How to apply 1. Fill the form with the intent and various work exposures you have

2. Send a 60–90 second Loom answering: "What's the one decision in editor architecture that most teams get wrong, and why?" 3. Include a link to code, a system you've designed, or a write-up that shows how you think.

Email: teams@workelate.com— subject line "Founding Engineer".