Founding Platform Engineer

ContractorHUB — Remote / Nashville, TN — Full-time

About ContractorHUB

ContractorHUB is a verticalized, AI-native Operating System for home-services contractors — roofing first, extensible to HVAC, solar, siding, and beyond. We're a small, well-funded, fast-moving team building the system of record for a market that the incumbents (Service Titan and friends) have outgrown without out-innovating. Multi-tenant Postgres, Laravel, Horizon queues, Reverb WebSockets, Cloudflare at the edge, Forge today, AWS tomorrow. Uptime is the business.

Our colleagues are proactive, high-energy, and excited to build alongside a team that values excellence without ego. At ContractorHUB, we move fast, think creatively, obsess over the customer experience, and believe the best ideas come from people who are curious, collaborative, cross-functional, and not afraid to bet on themselves.

The role

You are our first dedicated infrastructure hire, and you are not a pure DevOps engineer. You are a senior generalist who can read and write Laravel/PHP, design a cloud architecture, run a migration, and own production end-to-end. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our founding CTO and inherit infrastructure work he's been carrying solo. In 12-24 months you build the platform team behind you.

If "lead platform engineer" sounds like 100% pipelines and 0% product, this isn't quite that. We need someone who is genuinely experienced on both sides of the line — comfortable in the codebase and the cloud — and who has the judgment to know when each lever matters.

The marquee project: lead our migration from Forge-managed VPS to a modern AWS stack — Aurora, ECS, Secrets Manager, GitOps deploys — without downtime, with Cloudflare staying at the edge. Architecture, phasing, cutover, DR runbooks: yours to design.

Our operating principle: boring infrastructure is great infrastructure. Runbooks over heroics. Automate the second time. Measure what pays you, not what's easy.

What you'll own

• AWS migration. Design, plan, and lead the move from Forge-provisioned VPS to AWS. Aurora Postgres for the database, ECS (not EKS — we don't want Kubernetes complexity at this stage) for compute, S3 for storage, Secrets Manager for credentials, Cloudflare-at-the-edge unchanged. You make the calls; you ship the migration.

• GitOps deploys. Stand up an Argo CD or Flux pipeline so we get auditable, reversible deploys with environment promotion and approval gates. Forge's rollback story has carried us this far; the next chapter is yours.

• Failover and disaster recovery. Tested backups. Documented restore drills. Real DR runbooks. Cross-AZ failover. PITR across our per-tenant Postgres fleet. We have ~5,000 sticky users coming who use the system all day — downtime is unacceptable in a way that latency is not.

• PostgreSQL operations at scale. Per-tenant backup + point-in-time recovery, migration orchestration across hundreds of tenant databases, query/index health, connection pooling, replication.

• Cloud security. Secrets rotation, SSH hardening, IAM hygiene, audit logging, edge security and abuse mitigation, SOC 2 readiness on a 12-month horizon.

• Observability. Nightwatch for APM, app errors, log aggregation, SLOs, alerting that wakes a human only when a human is actually needed.

• Tenant provisioning reliability. The tenant-creation pipeline is business-critical and has a patent attached to it. You own making it bulletproof.

• Code, when it matters. You are not above the codebase. You'll diagnose Horizon stalls, Reverb disconnects, slow queries, and Laravel migrations directly.

• Team building. As the company scales, you hire and lead the platform team.

The right fit for the job has...

• 5-7 years in SaaS in SRE, Platform, Infrastructure, or senior full-stack-with-cloud-ops roles, with ownership of production at meaningful scale.

• Deep AWS fluency. Not just familiarity — you have personally shipped on AWS for the last 5+ years. You can speak fluently about failovers, multi-AZ DR, IAM design, cloud security tradeoffs, scaling patterns, and secrets management.

• PostgreSQL operations chops. Replication, PITR, tuning, PgBouncer or equivalent. Bonus if you've operated multi-tenant Postgres at scale.

• Modern deployment. Containerization, ECS or equivalent, GitOps (Argo CD / Flux), IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK).

• Comfortable in Laravel / PHP. You'll own queue workers and Horizon health and you'll occasionally fix them in code, not just provision around them.

• Hands-on agentic AI in the last 12 months. This is non-negotiable. Not Copilot autocomplete — agentic. Claude Code, Cursor in agent mode, multi-agent orchestration, AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md authoring, MCP, tool-using agents shipping real features. If "agentic AI" is a buzzword to you, this isn't the role.

• Cloudflare at the edge. Firewall, DNS, WAF rules, Workers when relevant.

• Founder mentality. You've shipped your own thing — a side project in production, a startup you co-founded, a SaaS pulling $100/month, an open-source project people actually use. We're not looking for a 9-to-5 hire. We're looking for someone whose default mode is ship.

• Clear communicator. During incidents, the whole company is listening.

Bonus points

• Multi-tenant SaaS operations: many-DB patterns, noisy-neighbor mitigation, tenant-level cost attribution.

• Experience with stancl/tenancy or similar Laravel tenancy packages.

• Prior Forge / Ploi → AWS migration.

• SOC 2 / HIPAA / compliance prep.

• Horizon, Reverb, or Redis deep operational knowledge.

• Team leadership or mentorship experience.

• Prior experience as a founder or first/second engineer at a seed or Series A startup.

How we work

• Small, technical, opinionated team. Your name is on what ships.

• Boring infrastructure, measurable uptime, runbooks over heroics.

• We trust the person closest to the problem to make the call.

• We are AI-native: Claude Code, agentic workflows, and MCP are part of the daily toolkit, not an experiment.

• On-call rotation will form as the team grows. For now you're primary, with reasonable escalation expectations.

Compensation & equity options

We are designing this offer for someone who genuinely wants founder-track upside, and we want the conversation to be transparent on day one.

• Performance bonus in year one is modest by design — equity is the story.

• Health and dental

• Internet and phone stipend

• Hardware: Latest version MBP speced out for local LLM / Ollama

• Remote-first; quarterly on-sites in Nashville

  
  

  For context, our internal projections put 1.5% equity on a path to seven figures within 3-4 years on the company's planned exit timeline. We're happy to walk through the math with serious candidates.To apply

To apply

Use our application at the link on this page and include the following with your Resume:

1. An incident writeup. A real production incident you owned — what broke, what you did in the first 30 minutes, what changed after. Five minutes of reading, max.

2. One architecture decision you'd revisit. A call you made that you'd make differently today, and why.

3. A runbook or postmortem you wrote. Redacted is fine.

4. A link to something you've shipped. A side project, a startup, an OSS repo, a Show HN — anything that proves you build, not just maintain.

5. One paragraph on agentic AI. Tell us about the most ambitious thing you've shipped using Claude Code, Cursor, or another agent — what the agent did, what you did, and what surprised you.

Shortlisted candidates spend 60-90 minutes with us on a whiteboard sketch of how you'd approach our Forge-to-AWS migration, given what you know about the stack.

We can't wait to meet you!