Founding Engineer
Forestwalk is hiring a Founding Engineer to help us build Powerplant, the multiplayer, transparency-first software factory for teams that care about UX. ⚡️
What's Forestwalk?
We're an early-stage startup building Powerplant. We're two repeat technical founders (Allen and Jenn) who have been building products and teams together for about ten years.
Coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor are engineering-brained. Canvas tools like Figma are designer-brained. But the future belongs to the Design Engineer, and today's siloed coding sessions are serving product generalists poorly.
We need help building Powerplant from its MVP – a review and transparency layer – into something big: the whole end-to-end software factory for teams that care about UX. 🚀
Who are we hiring?
We’re hiring somebody that can speed us up – help us ship and learn faster – but also bring the right mix of energy, curiosity, and craziness it takes to join a startup this early. 🙃
Currently we think of our values like this:
- Stay curious – Building from 0 to 1 means experimentation. We're energized by finding out how to do better.
- Build remarkable experiences – We create things that are worthy of our customers' attention: useful, but also beautiful and fast.
- Care personally – Software is about people. Great teams give a shit about customers and one another.
- Move fast – Speed isn't just about work completed. It means testing assumptions and changing our minds quickly, and keeping the right things simple.
We’re looking for somebody who’s comfortable shipping to customers, working both on frontend and backend, and excited to push from MVP through to scale.
Wait, so what is Powerplant exactly?
Great product teams build through frequent, informed feedback. But coding agents do their work inside isolated sessions, and the rest of the team often sees it too late.
Powerplant's MVP is a shared review and transparency layer for those sessions: see what the team is doing in realtime, give feedback while work is moving, and understand patterns across sessions. The details will evolve as we build it with early users, but that's where we're starting.
What's the tech stack?
Building something 0 to 1 is tricky. Powerplant needs to connect to coding harnesses, make concurrent work legible in realtime, and eventually orchestrate an end-to-end software factory. That's why we lean towards well-understood, pragmatic tech.
So far that's been TypeScript with React, Fastify, Tailwind, Anthropic, and Supabase, but at the end of the day we’ll use whatever tech makes sense for our customers. We already know a lot about building on LLMs, so we’re especially keen to talk to folks who have strong full-stack web skills.
Our codebase is set up to be easy for coding agents to work in, with automated tests, linters, review agents, and other tools that help us get improvements in front of customers fast, without committing slop. Given that, we're looking to hire people who have had at least some experience working with coding agents effectively.
What are the terms?
We're looking for somebody who can join us full time, with 2-3 days a week in-person in Gastown, Vancouver. We're VC-backed, so we can make this hire as a full-time employee. We’re open minded on the exact experience level and thus compensation that makes sense for the role, but likely in the $200k range, plus ~2-3% of equity.
That said, jumping in to an early-stage startup is risky! If you’d prefer to start with a 3-month trial contract, that could be a good way to test mutual fit.
How do I apply?
With your application, include three things:
- A link or PDF resume (LinkedIn is fine)
- Whether or not you're up for working in person 2-3 days/week downtown Vancouver
- What made you curious about this role in particular?