We're hiring our second engineer
ProjectionLab is bringing on another engineer.
That sentence feels wild to type.
For nearly five years, I’ve been the sole engineer building ProjectionLab. We’ve grown from a side project to a profitable, bootstrapped company trusted by thousands to plan their financial lives.
It has been intense, deeply rewarding, and a ton of fun.
But we’ve reached the point where the product deserves more engineering energy than one person can sustainably give it. So it’s time to bring on another builder.
If you’re a senior or staff-level, product-minded full-stack engineer who wants real direct-impact, high-accountability work on a tiny, efficient team, keep reading.
What you’ll do here
You’ll be our first engineering hire, joining a large, battle-tested Vue 3 plus TypeScript codebase that has evolved over about five years, with a Firebase and GCP backend.
Here’s the scope of the work:
Build and ship major product expansions end to end
You will take features from rough idea to polished launch, including shaping scope and architecture along the way.
Design and deploy clean, polished UI and UX
We live by a “zero ugly pages” philosophy. If a feature can’t be clean, we keep iterating until it is.
Modernize legacy components
You will help modernize and simplify, leaving every file better than you found it.
Work on correctness-critical financial and tax simulations
People make real financial decisions using ProjectionLab. Stability, precision, and regression prevention are paramount.
Strengthen our infrastructure and reliability
Over time, you will gradually share second-engineer on-call responsibility in a calm, sustainable way.
Use AI tools to raise the bar
I use Cursor and AI daily. We want someone who does too, and who knows how to ship cleaner, safer code with them, not just more code.
We move quickly, but with intention.
Why now
The business is healthy and we want to deliver even more value to our customers.
There are major product expansions we want to ship, UI polish that takes time to do right, and infrastructure work to keep everything stable as we scale. The roadmap is full of ideas. The demand is real. And with your help, we’ll bring even more of that vision to life.
The team today is me on engineering, Jonathan Kuipers on growth, Shawn Sansom in a generalist role, and a small customer success crew from this community.
We’ve kept it lean by choice. Everyone here works well together but runs independently, cares deeply about our customers and product, and ships work they’re proud of. We want to keep that vibe as we grow.
How we work is simple: there is no PM to write tickets, and no daily standups or sprint rituals.
You’ll often start from a rough idea and be responsible for architecting, scoping, and shipping the solution end to end. If you like being close to the product and seeing your work matter fast, this is that kind of place.
Who you are
You will thrive here if you are:
- Senior or staff level, and still love shipping real product
- Product minded, with strong UI instincts and taste
- Comfortable starting with ambiguity and creating clarity
- Deeply thoughtful about correctness, performance, and maintainability
- A skilled AI tool user who knows how to mitigate risk and keep the codebase clean
- High accountability, low ego
- Excited by small teams and big responsibility
You don’t need a perfect resume match. What matters is that you can take a problem, shape a good solution, and ship it at a high bar.
Who this is not for
This won’t be a fit if you are looking for:
- A lot of process or management oversight
- A role focused mostly on architecture or coordination instead of hands-on building
- A place to use AI tools naively and ship bloated, inconsistent PRs
We’re protecting a high-trust environment. Fit matters more to us than hiring fast.
How to apply
This is a flexible contract role. We’re remote and async-friendly. We want this to be a great fit on both sides, so we’ll begin with a part-time paid trial project in the real codebase.
If it feels great on both sides, we grow it, hopefully to full-time.
If this sounds like you, fill out our survey to apply.
We’ll review responses async and reach out to a small number of people for a call. We are only hiring if it is an excellent mutual fit. If we find that person, we are all in.
