About HOBB
House of Beloved Brands (HOBB™) is building the operating system for one of the fastest-growing segments in U.S. retail: multicultural food commerce.
We transform fragmented diaspora demand into:
• Measurable transaction data
• Reliable distribution infrastructure
• Scalable growth capital for global food brands
Our platform supports emerging and established food & beverage brands from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia entering and scaling in the U.S. market.
The role
You will be the first engineer at HOBB. That means you are not joining a team — you are starting one. You will own the architecture, make the technology decisions, ship the MVP, and eventually hire and mentor the engineers who build alongside you.
The core product is a two-sided logistics platform: a retailer-facing ordering portal and an internal operations layer for aggregating orders, forming shipment cohorts, integrating carrier APIs, and tracking freight from importer to store. You will build both sides, end to end.
This is not a role for someone who wants clear requirements handed to them. You will work directly with the Head of Logistics and the CEO to translate operational needs into software. The right candidate finds that energizing.
What you will build
Retailer ordering portal
- A clean, simple web interface for store owners to browse available products and place orders
- Order history, invoice tracking, and shipment status — visible at a glance
- Mobile-responsive and accessible to users who are not highly technical
- Multi-language support framework (English, Spanish, Creole, Hindi at minimum)
Order aggregation engine
- The core logic that groups retailer orders into shipment cohorts based on geography, volume, and timing
- Configurable co-op ordering schedules — weekly, bi-weekly, or on-demand windows
- Alerts and notifications when cohorts are forming, locked, and shipped
- Admin tooling for the ops team to manage and override cohort formation
Carrier & freight integration
- API integrations with LTL and FTL carriers for real-time rate quotes
- Freight cost allocation logic — distributing consolidated shipping costs fairly across retailers in a cohort
- Shipment tracking and status webhooks from carrier APIs to retailer dashboard
- Freight audit tooling to reconcile carrier invoices against quotes
Importer / supplier portal
- A dashboard for importers and wholesale suppliers to manage product listings, inventory, and fulfillment
- Purchase order generation and order confirmation flows
- Inventory availability signals that surface to the retailer ordering layer
Infrastructure & operations
- Own the cloud architecture from day one — scalable, observable, and cheap to run at early volume
- CI/CD pipeline, environment management, and deployment
- Error monitoring, alerting, and on-call ownership (you are the on-call engineer for a while)
- Data layer that supports the analytics and forecasting built by Engineer #2
Tech stack
We do not have a mandated stack. You will choose it. Below is what we expect to make sense given the problem — a web-first B2B platform with real-time data needs, third-party API integrations, and a small team that needs to move fast. If you have strong opinions, we want to hear them.
React / Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS / GCP, Stripe, REST / Webhooks, Docker
We are not dogmatic about any of this. What matters is that you can justify your choices and own the consequences.
What we are looking for
Must-have
- 5+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with genuine ownership of production systems
- Experience building marketplace, logistics, or B2B SaaS platforms — you understand two-sided product complexity
- Strong backend instincts — data modeling, API design, async processing, third-party integrations
- Comfortable making architecture decisions without a team of architects above you
- Track record of shipping quickly — an MVP mindset that does not sacrifice the foundations that matter
- Experience owning infrastructure and DevOps as part of your scope, not as someone else's job
Strongly preferred
- Experience at an early-stage startup as a founding or first engineer
- Prior work in logistics tech, freight, supply chain, or inventory management systems
- Carrier API integration experience — Shippo, EasyPost, FedEx Freight, XPO, or similar
- Internationalization (i18n) and multi-language frontend experience
- Experience designing systems where cost allocation or financial settlement logic is core to the product
Who you are
- You are comfortable being the only engineer in the room — and comfortable knowing when to ask for help
- You care about the downstream impact of what you build, not just the technical elegance of it
- You write code other engineers can read, systems other engineers can debug, and documentation other people can use
- You will be proud to tell people what HOBB does
How we work
Small team, high trust, fast iteration. We do not have a product manager writing tickets for you — you will be in direct conversation with the Head of Logistics and the CEO about what the platform needs to do. You will have to synthesize operational requirements into technical decisions on your own. There are no Jira boards at this stage. There is a Notion doc, a Slack, and weekly syncs.
We ship. We review. We improve. If you need six months of planning before you can write a line of code, this is not the right fit.
What we offer
- Founding engineer equity at 0.75–1.25%, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff
- $140,000 – $170,000 base salary
- Full technical ownership — stack, architecture, hiring plan, and engineering culture are yours to define
- Remote-first with no office requirement
- The chance to build infrastructure that directly reduces costs for thousands of immigrant-owned businesses
