Work from Home Founding Software Engineer Jobs, Salary up to SGD 10,000 in KIASA - Maukerja

Founding Engineer / Technical Lead

KIASA | Remote Worldwide
Compensation: USD $50–$70/hour
Company Location: Singapore

About KIASA

KIASA is an early-stage technology company based in Singapore.

We are building an AI-native technology platform and are looking for a Founding Engineer / Technical Lead to join us at an early stage and take meaningful ownership of our technical direction.

This is a hands-on engineering role with significant responsibility.

You will work directly with the CEO to design and build the core platform, make important architecture decisions, establish our engineering practices, and help grow the technical team over time.

We are looking for someone who enjoys building from the ground up and wants more ownership than they would typically have inside a larger engineering organization.

This position is 100% remote and open to candidates worldwide.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you will be one of the key technical contributors at KIASA.

You will help turn business and product requirements into production software while making practical decisions around architecture, infrastructure, AI, security, scalability, and engineering velocity.

This is not a pure management position.

We expect you to remain deeply hands-on: writing code, designing APIs, building backend services, integrating AI models, working with databases, deploying cloud infrastructure, reviewing technical decisions, and debugging production problems.

As KIASA grows, you will also have the opportunity to help shape the engineering organization, mentor future engineers, contribute to hiring, and establish the technical standards that the team will use going forward.

What You'll Work On

Your work will span product engineering, AI systems, backend infrastructure, and technical leadership.

You may be responsible for:

• Architecting and building KIASA's core technology platform
• Developing production backend services and APIs
• Building customer-facing and internal product features
• Designing scalable application and service architecture
• Building AI and LLM-powered workflows
• Implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems
• Developing AI agents, tool-calling workflows, and structured LLM outputs
• Building semantic search, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines
• Evaluating LLM quality, reliability, latency, and cost
• Designing relational data models and working with PostgreSQL
• Building asynchronous and event-driven processing systems
• Integrating external APIs and third-party platforms
• Deploying and operating cloud infrastructure
• Building CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows
• Establishing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting
• Improving system performance, reliability, and security
• Debugging application and infrastructure issues in production
• Making build-versus-buy and technology-selection decisions
• Reviewing architecture and code
• Helping recruit and mentor future engineers
• Working directly with the CEO on product and technical priorities

The exact scope will evolve as the company grows. That is part of the opportunity.

AI & LLM Engineering

AI is an important part of KIASA's technical direction.

We are particularly interested in engineers who understand how to move beyond an AI prototype and build reliable production systems around modern language models.

Relevant experience may include:

LLMs and Generative AI: OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Amazon Bedrock, open-weight models, prompt and context engineering, structured generation, tool/function calling, streaming, model routing, guardrails, and evaluation.

RAG and Search: embeddings, vector search, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, document ingestion, chunking, metadata filtering, reranking, context assembly, and retrieval evaluation.

AI Agents: agent orchestration, tool execution, workflow state, retries, human-in-the-loop patterns, evaluation, and observability.

Production AI: latency optimization, caching, rate limits, fallbacks, model monitoring, quality evaluation, token usage, and cost management.

You do not need to be an AI researcher.

We are primarily interested in engineers who know how to ship AI capabilities as reliable software products.

Backend & Platform Engineering

Strong backend engineering fundamentals are important for this role.

We are interested in experience with technologies such as:

Languages: Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, Java, or similar.

Backend: FastAPI, Node.js, REST APIs, gRPC, microservices, asynchronous processing, queues, caching, and distributed systems.

Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, SQL, object storage, search systems, and data pipelines.

Frontend: React, Next.js, or equivalent modern web frameworks.

You do not need to match our technology choices perfectly.

Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly matter more than experience with an exact framework.

Cloud & Infrastructure

You should be comfortable deploying and operating the systems you build.

Relevant experience may include:

AWS: EKS/ECS, EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS, Bedrock, CloudWatch, IAM, or related services.

Azure: AKS, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor, Key Vault, or related services.

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, monitoring, observability, networking, identity, secrets management, and production operations.

You do not need to know every service.

We value engineers who understand the underlying architecture and can choose the simplest reliable solution for the problem.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for an experienced engineer who can operate with a high degree of independence.

A strong candidate will typically have several of the following:

• Strong professional software engineering experience
• Experience building and operating production systems
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals
• Experience designing APIs, databases, and distributed services
• Hands-on experience with AI/LLM-powered applications
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or another major cloud platform
• Experience with Docker and production deployment
• Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration
• Strong understanding of relational databases
• Experience with system reliability, monitoring, and observability
• Good understanding of application and cloud security
• Experience making architecture and technology decisions
• Ability to investigate and solve difficult technical problems independently
• Experience working across multiple parts of a technology stack
• Strong written and verbal communication

Experience as a Senior, Staff, Principal, Lead, Founding, or early-stage startup engineer can be particularly relevant.

Previous founding-stage experience is helpful but not required.

What Matters Most

We are not looking for someone who simply has a long list of technologies on their resume.

We are looking for someone who can take a loosely defined problem, understand what actually needs to be built, make sensible technical decisions, implement the solution, deploy it, and improve it based on real-world usage.

You should be comfortable saying:

"This is the right architecture for where we are today."

You should also be comfortable changing that architecture when the company outgrows it.

We value engineers who understand that early-stage companies need both engineering quality and speed.

Technical Leadership

As an early technical leader, you will help establish how engineering works at KIASA.

You will contribute to decisions around architecture, development workflow, infrastructure, security, code quality, testing, deployment, observability, documentation, and technical hiring.

Over time, you may help interview and onboard engineers, mentor team members, review designs, and lead larger technical initiatives.

We are looking for someone who can provide technical leadership without moving away from hands-on engineering.

Who Will Do Well Here

You will probably enjoy this role if you like ownership and building things from an early stage.

There will not always be a detailed specification waiting for you.

Sometimes we will know the business problem before we know the technical solution.

You should be comfortable asking questions, proposing an approach, discussing tradeoffs with the CEO, and then turning that decision into working software.

You should enjoy moving between different levels of the stack.

On one day, you might be designing a system architecture. On another, you might be debugging a Python service, improving an LLM workflow, reviewing a database query, or fixing a deployment issue.

You should care about quality without requiring perfect conditions before shipping.

Why Join KIASA

Founding-stage ownership

You will join early enough to have meaningful influence over the technology, product, architecture, and future engineering organization.

Direct access to the CEO

You will work directly with company leadership and participate in important product and technical decisions.

Hands-on technical influence

This is not a narrow implementation role. You will have the opportunity to influence architecture while continuing to build the systems yourself.

AI-native development

You will work on products designed around modern AI capabilities rather than simply adding an AI feature to an established legacy platform.

Global remote environment

KIASA is headquartered in Singapore, but this position is open to qualified candidates worldwide.

Opportunity to grow with the company

As the engineering organization grows, the scope of this role can grow with it.

Compensation

USD $50–$70 per hour

Final compensation will depend on experience, technical depth, responsibilities, and overall fit for the role.

Because we are hiring internationally, the exact engagement structure may vary depending on the candidate's location and applicable local requirements.

Work Location

100% Remote

Candidates may work from anywhere in the world.

Because KIASA is headquartered in Singapore and operates as a distributed company, candidates should be comfortable collaborating remotely across time zones.

Any required overlap in working hours will be discussed during the interview process.

Hiring Process

Our process is designed to understand how you actually think and build rather than test memorized theory.

Candidates can expect conversations around:

• Your engineering background and projects
• Systems you have personally built or owned
• Architecture and technical tradeoffs
• AI/LLM engineering experience, where applicable
• Backend and cloud engineering
• How you approach ambiguous early-stage problems
• Collaboration with founders and small teams

We may also include a practical technical discussion or coding exercise relevant to the work.

We will explain the process clearly before each stage.

How to Apply

Please apply with your resume or LinkedIn profile.

GitHub, a technical portfolio, open-source contributions, or examples of systems you have built are welcome but not required.

In your application, we'd especially like to hear about one product, platform, or technical system you personally helped take from idea to production and what you were responsible for.

About KIASA

KIASA is a Singapore-based early-stage technology company building AI-native software and infrastructure.

We believe small, highly capable engineering teams can build substantially more than was possible only a few years ago by combining strong software engineering with modern AI.

We are building our technical organization around that idea and are looking for an engineer who wants to help shape it from the beginning.

If you are a hands-on engineer who wants genuine technical ownership and the opportunity to help build both the product and the engineering organization, we'd like to hear from you.

KIASA welcomes applicants from different backgrounds and locations. Hiring decisions are based on skills, experience, role requirements, and the ability to perform the work.

Pay: $5,000.00 - $10,000.00 per month

Work Location: Remote