Founding Full-Stack Engineer

You’ll work directly with the founders to turn customer problems into production software - from understanding what to build and making the technical trade-offs to shipping it. You’ll own meaningful parts of the stack from day one and have a real say in how Caven evolves as we grow.

You’ll help shape:

• Product direction: turning customer problems into useful products
• Architecture: making the technical decisions that will shape Caven for years
• Security: building the foundations our customers need to trust us with their most sensitive data
• Engineering practices: deciding how we build, test and operate software
• Developer tooling: finding ways for a small team to move exceptionally fast
• What we build next: staying close to customers and challenging assumptions
• The team: helping define our engineering culture and eventually the people we hire

We don’t expect you to have all the answers, we’re looking for someone who enjoys figuring them out.

What you’ll do

• Own and evolve our TypeScript stack across the Electron desktop app, React/Vite web frontend, Expo/React Native mobile app and Express/Node.js backend.
• Take features from idea to prototype to production, driven directly by user feedback.
• Build integrations that connect Caven with the tools our customers already use.
• Build the foundations of our API/MCP layer, making Caven’s conversational knowledge accessible across a firm’s existing stack.
• Design and implement secure systems for handling sensitive conversational data.
• Work across data, infrastructure, AI and product to turn conversations into structured, searchable knowledge.
• Establish engineering standards around testing, observability, reliability and security as the team grows.
• Use AI-native tooling such as Claude Code and OpenCode to increase your leverage and help a small team ship exceptionally quickly.

Must-haves

• At least 1+ year of professional full-stack experience
• You understand encryption fundamentals and can help build a genuinely secure data environment.
• Strong across the stack: TypeScript, Node backend, cloud infra, encryption, data storage and transfer principles.
• Product instinct: you find the right technical solution to a user problem, not just the obvious one.
• You ship fast without cutting corners on reliability or security

Experience with LLMs, speech-to-text, audio pipelines, retrieval/RAG, knowledge graphs, security, compliance or 0*1 products is a big plus.

Who you are

• Direct communicator: you say what you think and can take honest feedback the same way
• Ownership: you pick up a problem because it needs solving, not because it’s in your lane
• Mamba mentality: You have a drive to be successful and you have the flexibility and mindset to achieve results

• Full-time employment with a competitive salary and participation in our ESOP / stock option plan, with the exact package depending on experience and stage.
• Open to freelance/contractor arrangements for the right person
• You’ll work directly with the founding team every day - no layers of management, no corporate bureaucracy.
• Hybrid setup in Ghent with flexibility. Access to the events, community and free gym at our office in Wintercircus
• The tools you need to do your best work: we’re AI-native and don’t cheap out on developer tooling.
• The opportunity to shape the product, architecture and engineering culture from the ground up

Process

1. Intro call with David (CEO). What we’re building, what you’re after.
2. Technical deep-dive with Jelle (CTO). How you think, how you ship.
3. Technical case study in our offices in Ghent. Real problem, real context.
4. Final chat and offer

Caven is building the conversational intelligence infrastructure for Europe’s regulated firms.

Every important meeting contains valuable information: decisions, commitments, context, relationships, expertise and things that need to happen next. Today, most of that knowledge disappears after every conversation.

Caven captures those conversations, processes them securely and turns them into structured knowledge that firms can search, query and use across the tools they already work with.

We’re starting with law firms, banks, M&A boutiques, Private Equity, notaries and other regulated businesses - firms where conversations contain some of their most valuable information, but confidentiality makes mainstream AI tools difficult to use.

That makes Caven a very different engineering problem from building another meeting-notes app. We’re combining audio, AI, data and security to turn messy conversations into reliable, structured knowledge that can be searched and connected to the tools firms already use. The hard part is making that work with sensitive real-world data: imperfect transcriptions and AI outputs, encryption, permissions, provenance, realtime processing, knowledge extraction, retrieval and integrations - while maintaining the reliability and security that regulated customers require.

We’re freshly funded by imec.istart and are now looking for our first software engineer to help us built the foundation of our product and technical direction., Caven is an equal opportunity employer. We hiring decisions based on skills, experience, potential and alignment with the role.