Founding Engineer

TL;DR:
We're looking for a Founding Engineer in Zurich to with a bias for action to help us build our product foundations, ship features fast, and shape our team culture.

About Porters and Our Vision

Porters is building the AI-first Banking Operations platform for leading fintechs and banks. We're driven by a bold vision: Running Banking Operations end-to-end by AI.

Our approach combines frontier AI technology with deep operational banking expertise to automate mission-critical processes. Porters re-defines how fintechs and banks solve complex Banking Ops tasks in the AI era by providing an autonomous and resilient infrastructure with local compliance built-in.

With our first pilots launching, early team members can profoundly shape the future of our product. We're backed by the people behind Revolut, N26, Qonto, Upvest, UiPath, and more leading tech startups.

About Our Team

Our lean team brings a proven track record building financial tech infrastructure, consulting banks, and PhD-level AI research. A few pointers:

• We're a small, focused team working in-person from Zurich, Switzerland
• We're all-in for the long-term, our ambition is to build foundational infrastructure in banking
• We're committed to excellence and prioritize talent density over short-term growth
• We share and celebrate our success: We grant equity to make you an owner in Porters
• Prios for us are 1/ creating value for our clients, 2/ nurturing growth in people, and 3/ building a rockstar team – we go through wins, losses, and learnings together

Your Responsibilities

As a Founding Engineer, you'll be instrumental in building our product from the ground up:

• Ship features fast by taking full ownership of new features, work across the stack, and prioritize radically
• Build our core platform that enables autonomous banking operations at scale
• Work directly with our clients, leading banks and fintechs, in calls or in one of many slack channels, to understand their most pressing problems and find solutions
• Shape our product direction by directly influencing what we build and how
• Elevate our Engineering culture, defining how we work, hire, and grow

Your Profile

We're looking for a builder who thrives in ambiguity and wants to create something from 0 to 1:

• You're pragmatic, prioritize ruthlessly, and are organize your own work
• 5+ years experience building reliable, scalable software, ideally with Python exposure
• Hard worker who thrives in a small, accountable team taking ownership
• Experience working with LLMs and pushing their boundaries in banking applications
• CS or quantitative degree preferred

Bonus points:

• Former founder or CTO
• ML/AI background
• Messaging or communications experience
• Experience in fintech, banking, or regulated industries

What We Offer

• Direct impact, working with clients, and shipping fast
• Significant equity on top of salary compensation
• Working closely with the founders who've built and scaled fintech and analytics products before
• Development budget, free to use for whatever gives you a level-up
• Regular team activities and dinners
• Office in the heart of Zurich, new Macbook Pro, and more

Our Stack

Infrastructure: AWS stack (incl. ECS, RDS, Aurora, S3, StepFunctions, Lambda)

Backend: Python, FastAPI, MySQL, SQLAlchemy

AI: Foundational models from Anthropic & Mistral, observability tools, own MCPs and agentic workflow pipelines

We are AI-first and expect every team member to identify and unlock potential for our clients and ourselves, leveraging AI where it's meaningful. We're excited to explore new methods, tools and languages that give us an edge. There couldn't be a better time to build than now.

Why Porters?

• Build greenfield in AI & Fintech, solving hard problems
• Small team with high autonomy
• Performance and learning-focused culture
• You are still joining really early
• Competitive equity package

If what's written above speaks to you, whether you look like a fit on paper or not, please reach out to the Porters founders Michael, Chris, and Konstantin on