Founding Engineer | SkiQQED | Full-stack

Location: Remote, Nigeria. Full-time.

Compensation: ₦200,000 monthly base, rising as KPIs are met, plus 20% equity.

Reports to: Founder and CEO.

We are an internship platform for Africa, launching now. Students apply with their actual work instead of a CV. AI reads it, matches them to real openings, and names the exact skill gap holding them back. Working professionals get paid to close it.

We are looking for one engineer to own the entire product. Not a hire. A co-founder.

Why this role exists:

I am consolidating engineering into one person who owns everything, rather than splitting it across several who own pieces.

That means you will not be waiting on anyone, negotiating scope with anyone, or inheriting someone else’s half-finished work. The codebase, the architecture, the deployment, the AI layer. Yours.

It also means there is nobody to hide behind. If it does not ship, that is on you and me.

What you will own:

1. The full stack. JavaScript frontend, Node backend, AWS infrastructure. EC2, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudFront, MediaConvert, Cognito.
2. The AI layer. Our matching engine maps portfolios into a shared skills taxonomy so a barbering video and a code repository can be scored in the same space. You will own that, plus assessment generation, mentor routing and the integrity checking that stops people uploading work that is not theirs.
3. A media-heavy product on bad connections. Our users are on mid-range Android phones with metered data, uploading photos and video. Resumable uploads, client-side compression, offline capture. This is harder than it sounds and it is where most of the real engineering sits.
4. Server-side rendering. Our entire organic acquisition strategy depends on it. Non-negotiable.
5. Shipping. Daily standups, weekly releases, and a bias toward getting something in front of users over getting it perfect.

What we need from you:

1. Five years or more building full-stack products. Not five years of tutorials. Things that shipped and that people used.
2. You have owned a codebase end to end. Architecture, deployment, monitoring, the 2am incident. You know what it costs to make something reliable.
3. JavaScript across the stack. Node, modern frontend, real database design. You can explain why you made a schema decision eighteen months after you made it.
4. You build with AI and you build AI. Both halves matter.
5. Building with it: you use Claude Code, Cursor or similar daily and you ship meaningfully faster because of it. A small company cannot afford an engineer working at 2019 speed.
6. Building it: you have integrated LLMs into production. You understand prompt engineering as an engineering discipline, you have built agentic workflows, and you know the difference between a demo that works once and a system that works at scale and at a sane cost.
7. You care about cost per inference. Our revenue is in naira and inference is priced in dollars. If that tension does not interest you, this will frustrate you.
8. You are available full time. Not alongside another startup.

What would make you stand out:

You have worked on something with real users in an African market and understand what that constrains. You have built media pipelines or anything involving video at scale. You have self-hosted open-weight models. You have opinions about where AI genuinely helps and where it is theatre, and you can defend them.

What you get:

1. 20% equity, vesting over four years with a twelve-month cliff. Co-founder, on the cap table, in the room for every decision that matters.
2. ₦200,000 monthly to start. Honestly below market, and I will not pretend otherwise. It rises as we hit KPIs and again when we close our pre-seed round.
3. Full ownership of the technical direction. I will tell you what the product needs to do. How it gets built is yours.
4. A product that is already real. Not a deck. 101 features built, over a thousand students on the waitlist, live pilot placements running in Nigeria.

<