Founding Software Engineer

About the role

LOKAL is a fast‑growing marketing and technology company serving hotels. As the first engineer to join the founder, you will inherit production‑ready AI systems and shape the engineering architecture, processes, and tooling that power revenue‑generating products.

Key responsibilities

• Deliver client‑facing AI solutions, including chatbot rollouts for individual hotels and automation pipelines for new tech clients.
• Stabilise and extend the content‑automation layer that drafts and publishes AI‑generated content to client CMSs.
• Define and implement engineering best practices: environments, testing, migrations, deployments, and observability.
• Build new tools and interfaces on the company OS, collaborating daily with the founder.

Required profile

• Proven ability to take a problem from scoping to production independently.
• Comfortable making technical decisions without a detailed spec.
• Strong experience with AI‑enabled products (retrieval‑grounded chatbots, LLM routing, cost/latency trade‑offs).
• Solid software‑process fundamentals, including testing, CI/CD, and documentation.

Required skills

• Node.js & Express
• Supabase (PostgreSQL)
• n8n, Railway, Vercel
• Anthropic Claude, Meta and Google APIs
• CMS APIs, GitHub workflow (branches, PRs, reviews)
• Testing, migrations, observability, and CI/CD pipelines

What we offer

• Immediate impact: code goes to production for real hotel clients within days.
• Access to multiple premium AI subscriptions used by the founder.
• Fully remote, async‑first work environment with Manila‑timezone overlap.
• Direct collaboration with the founder and a revenue‑carrying product stack.