Founding Engineer

Elevate helps MSPs deliver AI transformation to small and mid-sized businesses that can't do it themselves.

Our ElevateGrow module is the MSP's AI practice operating system, surfacing opportunities across their clients' businesses and helping partners identify, scope and sell solutions. ElevateSolutions is a catalogue of productized, "do-it-for-me" solutions sold through the MSP and delivered to the end customer.

Elevate was founded by Russ Morton and Jake Berkowsky to deliver AI transformations that "help the small stand tall."

• The mission. We help small businesses win in the age of AI.
• The market. $600B a year in revenue. 150K MSPs. 1M+ small businesses. No other industry has human labor, software and AI colliding at this scale.
• The team. Backed by Tier 1 VCs. A leadership team with deep MSP channel experience and builders from Snowflake, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Notarize and Bitsight.

The role

Elevate is hiring a Founding Engineer to build the core systems behind our AI platform and the solutions our MSP partners deliver to their customers.

You'll own the backend services, integrations and workflow infrastructure that connect business systems and enable AI agents to execute useful work reliably. This means engineering the foundational capabilities behind AI-powered solutions, from agent execution and orchestration to the secure integrations that make these systems work in real business environments.

As an early member of the engineering team, you'll help shape the architecture, make important technical decisions and take features from initial requirements through production. You'll balance the opportunities of rapidly evolving AI technology with the practical engineering needed to build software that is secure, reliable and maintainable.

You'll also work with MSP partners and customers to understand requirements, answer technical questions and support implementations where engineering involvement makes a difference. Those conversations will help inform what you build and identify opportunities to turn individual customer needs into reusable platform capabilities.

You'll have meaningful ownership over both the software you build and the engineering practices that shape how we build it.

What you'll do

• Build the backend foundations of an AI platform. Design, build and maintain the backend services, APIs and integrations that power Elevate's platform and AI solutions.
• Engineer reusable workflow capabilities. Build the infrastructure and execution logic that enable reusable workflows across common business processes and industry-specific needs.
• Develop deep integrations with business systems. Build integrations across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, Microsoft 365 and Teams, connecting Elevate's platform to the tools businesses use every day.
• Build secure identity and access infrastructure. Implement authentication, authorization and permission management across Microsoft Entra, Google and Elevate, ensuring access remains appropriately scoped to each partner and customer.
• Build the core infrastructure for AI agents. Develop backend capabilities spanning tool execution, context and memory, orchestration and governance, enabling AI agents to interact with business systems and execute workflows reliably.
• Make informed technical tradeoffs. Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions as we develop our agent capabilities and engineering tooling, balancing technical needs with practical engineering considerations.
• Engineer for production reliability. Own the quality of what you ship through testing, observability, error handling and troubleshooting complex production issues across services and integrations.
• Collaborate directly with partners and customers. Participate in selected conversations to understand technical requirements, assess feasibility and resolve implementation challenges.
• Turn customer needs into scalable capabilities. Identify recurring requirements and translate them into reusable services, integrations and workflows that the broader engineering team can build on.
• Drive engineering execution. Break down technical work, triage issues, surface dependencies and follow through on commitments to keep engineering delivery moving.

Who you are

• You've built and operated production backend systems. You're comfortable designing APIs, working with databases, integrating external systems and debugging complex problems across service boundaries.
• You turn ambiguity into practical engineering solutions. You can take an undefined need and translate it into a thoughtful technical design. You know when to move quickly, where reliability matters and how to build systems that others can understand, maintain and extend.
• You have hands-on experience with the Microsoft ecosystem. You're familiar with Azure and integrating Microsoft services. You understand how identity and permissions influence application behavior and can work through those complexities when building solutions.
• You're excited by the engineering challenges of AI agents. You're interested in building the systems that make agents useful and reliable beyond the initial demo. You think about what happens when workflows fail, dependencies change or agents need secure access to customer data.
• You communicate with customers clearly and empathetically. You ask thoughtful questions, understand customer needs and explain technical constraints in plain language. You bring those insights back to the team to inform better engineering decisions.
• You take ownership and thrive in ambiguity. You're comfortable moving forward without waiting for detailed instructions. You keep others informed, work effectively with a fast-moving team and remain open to feedback.
• You believe teaching and learning go hand in hand. You enjoy sharing what you know, learning from others and helping teammates become more capable.

Bonus points

• Experience building agentic systems, including tool use, memory, orchestration, evaluation or governance.
• Deep expertise in Microsoft Entra, Google identity or authentication and authorization for applications serving multiple customer organizations.
• Data engineering experience, including database design, ingestion pipelines, data modeling and processing operational data.
• Experience working with Product to determine what data to collect and how to make it useful.
• Familiarity with MSPs, IT service providers or the systems used by small and mid-sized businesses.
• Experience supporting customer implementations or contributing to technical discovery.
• Experience at an early-stage startup where engineers own work from initial requirements through production.