Founding Engineer

Company overview

Shinka builds an advanced ad-tech platform focused on programmatic monetisation for CTV and DOOH. The company connects advertisers and publishers through a modern system that handles billions of ad requests each day and is designed to deliver measurable outcomes through technology and partnerships.

Role summary

The company is hiring a Founding Engineer to help shape the next stage of product development. The core infrastructure is already in place; the main opportunity is the product layer on top, especially the move from raw JSON configuration toward AI-assisted, self-serve setup. This is an AI-native engineering environment where agentic development tools such as Claude Code are a central part of how the team builds software.

This is an individual contributor role based in the Dublin office, working directly with the founder to turn ideas into production software for real customers.

Key responsibilities

• Take ownership of features from design through build, launch, monitoring, and iterative improvement in production.
• Work closely with the founder to convert product direction into working software used by customers.
• Shape the product layer of the platform, including the configuration experience, AI-assisted and self-serve setup flows, and reporting that helps publishers trust the numbers they see.
• Expand integrations with demand-side and supply-side partners as the customer base grows.
• Engage directly with customers and publishers to understand needs, support technical integrations, and feed insights back into product decisions.
• Serve as a technical contact for customer-facing product and implementation questions.
• Help define engineering standards and contribute to the culture of the team as it grows.
• Influence technical direction and architecture as the platform evolves.
• Promote agentic development workflows and AI-assisted engineering practices, including tools such as Claude Code, across the team and with engineering partners.

Desired experience and qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to ship production-grade software quickly and consistently.
• A product-focused mindset, with attention to why a feature is being built and the value it creates for users.
• Comfort working with uncertainty and partial specifications.
• Understanding of low-latency, high-throughput systems and the importance of tail latency.
• Strong adoption of AI-native development practices, with a habit of using agentic tools in day-to-day work and pushing the team to use them effectively.

Nice to have

• Experience in programmatic advertising, RTB, OpenRTB, Prebid.js, or Prebid Server.
• Exposure to low-latency, high-QPS distributed systems.
• Experience working as an early engineer at a startup.

Compensation and benefits

The base salary for this position is €90,000 to €130,000, depending on experience. The role also includes equity with standard 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff.

The position is based in Dublin, with a hybrid schedule that requires three days per week in the office and allows two days per week working from home.

Application notes

Candidates should send a short note to the hiring team with two items: one example that demonstrates how they build, such as a repository, shipped product, or side project; and a CV. The company values the build example more highly than a polished resume.

The subject line should be formatted as: Founding Engineer - [your name]

Applicants who do not match every criterion exactly are still encouraged to apply if the role feels like the right next step.

The company is building its team in Dublin and is specifically looking for people who are currently based in Ireland, or who already have the right to work in Ireland, and who are excited to work from Dublin.