Software Engineer

What pbl is.

pbl is the loop between climbers and their gyms. Climbers log sends and rate routes in the mobile app. Their gym sees all of it in real time in the portal: what climbers love, what gets quietly skipped, whether last week's set landed the way the setter hoped. Then they turn it into the next rotation.

No one has built this before. The apps are built. The doors just aren't open yet. Real gyms are waiting. This hire is one of the last pieces before we ship.

The role.

You'd be pbl's second engineer, working the full stack with Dylan and Jake. Typescript everywhere. Next.js on the web, react native (expo) on mobile, firebase + gcp on the backend. Shared schemas flow to both apps from a central package, so the codebase stays consistent without duplication.

Nothing is siloed. You'll touch the mobile app, the portal, the cloud functions, the schemas, and the deployment pipeline in the same week. Small enough that you'll get your hands on all of it. Big enough that every piece has real surface area.

What you'll actually do.

• Ship features across mobile and portal.
• Own pieces of the backend: cloud functions, firestore schemas, deployment workflows
• Work directly with Jake on the product surface. You're the one turning his designs into shipping code.
• Help us get to launch. Polish, performance, the stuff that becomes real the moment users are on it.
• Keep taste high and technical debt low.

How we work with ai.

We use claude code every day. It's how we ship. The tools make us faster, not lazier. You still set the direction, still read the output skeptically, still catch where the model drifted off-pattern, still debug what it can't see. It's your code either way. Own it.

If you think ai tools are a fad, this isn't for you . If you think they replace understanding, same answer .

Who this is for.

• Early career. 0-3 years professional, or a strong self-taught track record. What you've built matters more than where you worked.
• Comfortable in typescript. You don't need to be an expert, but you can hold your own without googling what a generic is.
• Familiar with at least some of our stack. Bonus if you've shipped something real with any of it.
• Curious by default. You build things nobody asked you to build.
• Coachable. You'd rather be told the cleaner way than quietly do it the long way.

Who this isn't for.

• Senior engineers looking for a senior title. This isn't that role.
• Anyone who needs a detailed spec for every task. You get direction and context. You figure out the rest.
• Anyone who needs a paycheck tomorrow. Equity-only until we ship.

Pay.

pbl is bootstrapped and pre-revenue. We can't pay cash yet, and we'd rather say that than dress it up. The equity is meaningful. We benchmark against 2026 founding-engineer ranges and apply a zero-cash premium on top. We'll walk you through the cap table before you sign anything.

How we work.

Flexibility is real. We don't track hours. We don't care when or where you work. How you get to good is yours to figure out. We care that the work is good, and that you're the kind of person who notices something broken and fixes it because it bugs you, not because someone filed a ticket.

How to apply.

Send a note to [email protected] with:

1. Who you are, what you're into, why pbl sounds interesting
2. A link to something you've built (github, deployed project, anything real)
3. How you actually use ai in your workflow. not the sales pitch, just what you do.

Lead with what pulls you in, not your linkedin.