dcox79

Founding Engineer — SMB Internal Tools SaaS on Azure

Default Route Advisory is hiring its founding engineer.

We are a two-person company (CEO + CTO) building SaaS internal tools for small and mid-sized businesses, shipped on Azure. The first product is in scope; the first paying customer is not yet. Your job is to help us get from here to there.

This is the first engineering hire. You will co-own what the product is, what stack it runs on, and what "good enough to ship" means. There is no PM, no designer, no SRE, no DevEx team. There is the CEO, the CTO, and — if we hire you — you.

What you will do in your first 90 days

dcox79

Phase 1 Contract Product Designer — Brief & Rubric

Owner: UX Designer · Issue: DEF-10 · Source decision: DEF-5 plan · Wedge: A — SMB internal-tools SaaS on Azure (DEF-2 §3)

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1. The role in one paragraph

We need a senior product designer to own three surfaces for an 8-week Phase 1 of an SMB internal-tools SaaS on Azure: a small marketing site, a pricing page, and one end-to-end product happy-path flow (signup → first value → paid). You work 2 days/week for 8 weeks, starting one week before the founding engineer. You design directly against Next.js + Tailwind + shadcn/ui, so handoff is tokens and a shadcn-aligned component inventory — not a from-scratch design system. Clean exit at week 8. No equity, no expectation of conversion to full-time; if the wedge proves out, a founding-designer role is a separate conversation.