About Rowm

Rowm is a London-based tech start-up transforming automotive logistics by automating vehicle movement for dealerships and fleet operators.

Role Overview

As Rowm's first engineering hire, you'll partner directly with our CTO to define our technical vision, architecture, and engineering culture. You'll take ownership across our entire technology stack, help build our engineering team, and directly influence our product development and operational strategies.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with the CTO to develop architecture and technical roadmaps.
• Work with product, operations, and commercial teams to refine and scope new product features from ambiguous concepts.
• Design, implement, and deploy full-stack features within our TypeScript monorepo, including Next.js front-ends, event-driven back-ends, and federated GraphQL services.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards: automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as code.
• Ensure production reliability through effective instrumentation, monitoring, debugging, and performance optimization of services running on GKE and Vercel.
• Lead performance and optimization efforts, particularly around geospatial queries, scheduling algorithms, and real-time user interfaces.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure technical solutions directly address customer challenges.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop future engineering team members, fostering a high-trust, high-performance culture.

Desired Skills & Experience

Must-Have

• 4-8 years of experience delivering production software, ideally in start-up or scale-up environments.
• Expertise in TypeScript across Node.js and React/Next.js ecosystems.
• Comfort and experience working within monorepo environments with shared libraries, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Proven capability to transform loosely defined business problems into clear, iterative technical solutions.
• Strong ownership mindset; proactive in addressing and resolving issues.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience designing GraphQL schemas, gateways, and federation patterns.
• Knowledge of cloud-native operations, including Docker, Kubernetes, logging, and monitoring tools.
• Familiarity with event-driven or CQRS architectures (Pub/Sub, Kafka, NATS).
• Experience with optimization tools (OptaPlanner, OR-Tools) or AI/ML pipelines.
• Background in route optimization, geospatial data processing, or similar algorithm-intensive domains.
• Experience with Tailwind CSS and component-library development.
• Strong understanding of security practices such as OAuth, RBAC, and secure middleware design.
• Prior hiring or mentoring experience.

Soft Skills

• Clear and effective communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative, team-oriented mindset; comfortable pair-programming and mentoring.
• Bias for action, iterative problem-solving, and adaptability based on data-driven insights.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: Competitive, calibrated to London market standards.
• Equity: Meaningful stock options at seed stage with clear visibility toward Series A funding.
• Remote-first: Flexible work arrangements within +/-3 hours of UK timezone, monthly in-person London meetings.