About the job
Founding Product Engineer
Homemade
Seattle, WA (Onsite) · Full-time
Job Context
Homemade is building the infrastructure layer for food decisions in America, starting in Seattle. Founded by Joel Gamoran — chef, author, and TV host — it already reaches 20 million people a year through the largest cooking-class platform in the country. The next product puts a chef in everyone's pocket: a text-first, recipe-driven guidance system that helps families turn the food they already have into meals, cutting waste, saving money, and improving health outcomes. The insight is simple — people don't need more nutrition education, they need help in the moment they're deciding what to cook. The business runs on a B2B2C model, where government agencies, healthcare systems, employers, and sponsors pay for access and the end user never does, with non-dilutive, contract-based revenue and active contracts with major healthcare systems and governments. This is past concept stage: the platform needs to perform at production grade — compliant, reliable, and built to scale.
You will be the first full-time engineer at Homemade. There's no engineering team today, no repo, no CI/CD — you're building from zero, and that's the point. You'll work directly with Joel, translating product vision into a system that works in the real world for hospital patients, city agencies, and everyday families. Joel is a visual communicator who whiteboard-sketches ideas and prototypes in Claude, then hands you the baton to build; expect four to six hours of face time daily — whiteboarding, debating, aligning — then you go heads-down and ship. A fractional CTO with enterprise-scale build experience provides architectural guidance and reviews your work on a regular cadence, so you have a sounding board, but the code, the infrastructure, and the shipping cadence are yours. This is an in-person role in Seattle, Monday through Thursday, with Fridays flexible.
From day one you're setting the technical foundation: a mobile-first web experience for recipe delivery, personalization, and ingredient substitution, tuned for low-end devices and sub-two-second loads; the SMS loop, via Twilio or equivalent, that reaches users two to three times a week at the moment they're deciding what to cook; and Claude/LLM integrations that power real-time recipe modification, dietary-constraint handling, and personalized follow-ups that get smarter over time. You'll stand up serverless infrastructure — AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB or equivalent — that scales without unnecessary cost, a lightweight partner dashboard for government and hospital systems, and data flows that handle institutional nutrition parameters like oncology-appropriate meal guidance without touching HIPAA-protected data, plus the CI/CD, GitHub, and code-review processes the whole company will build on.
You fit if you've shipped production software end to end for three to six years — not just features inside someone else's architecture — with proven work in mobile-first web apps and serverless infrastructure (AWS Lambda preferred), SMS/messaging integration (Twilio or equivalent), and hands-on LLM integration where you've actually built products on Claude, GPT, or similar rather than just used them. You bring strong product intuition, thinking in user outcomes rather than tickets and willing to push back on the founder when it matters, and a compliance-aware mindset: you understand what HIPAA-adjacent means, know when to flag risk, and build systems that earn institutional trust from healthcare and government clients. You're Seattle-based and in-office Monday through Thursday. Experience as employee #1 to #5, a background in food, health, consumer, or gov tech, familiarity with public-sector or health-system procurement, and a real passion for food are all strong pluses.
How hiring works here
Applying with Provn is designed to get more interviews for the best candidates coming in without a referral. Instead of sending a cold resume into an ATS and waiting, you complete a challenge built for this role and submit a short video walking through how you approached it.
For this role, completing the challenge is required — only applications that include the challenge submission will be considered by the hiring manager. You build with AI the way you would on the job, then submit your work along with a short video that walks through your thinking.
Why that works in your favor:
- You show how you actually build and ship with AI, instead of hoping a resume gets it across.
- Your judgment with AI becomes visible on a real build, which no resume bullet can prove.
- One challenge puts you in front of the founder, scored on the work, with no referral required to get there.
The hiring manager reviews every completed submission, and the strongest candidates go straight to an interview round. No referral needed. Performance over pedigree. Proof over polish.
What's in it for you
Compensation is $125,000-$175,000 base depending on experience, plus equity participation vesting on a standard schedule. Beyond the package, this is employee #1 on engineering — you set the technical foundation the company builds on for years, in direct daily collaboration with a founder who has a real audience, real contracts, and real momentum, with architectural guidance from a fractional CTO who has built at enterprise scale. The work ships to real users: families, local governments, and hospitals, including families whose children are going through treatment cooking meals that are safe, affordable, and actually good. Homemade welcomes candidates on OPT or STEM OPT and those needing an H-1B transfer; new H-1B sponsorship is not available for this role at this time.
Apply by completing the challenge at provn.co, where the full role details live.
Pay: $125,000.00 - $175,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
