Founding Engineer at Pangolin (S25)

About Pangolin

Pangolin is building a new kind of open-source proxy: cloud-orchestrated, identity-aware, tunneled, and highly available. It’s the simplest way to securely expose applications on any network—only the people you want get access to your apps, and we block everyone else. Since launching 7 months ago, we’ve earned 15,000 GitHub stars, over 315,000 deployments, and 675 paying customers—making us one of the top recommended tools for secure app access.

About the role

Skills: Next.js, Express, Git, Go, TypeScript, Docker, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are looking for a Founding Engineer to join early and drive the development of our open-source, networking and secure access platform. As an early hire, you'll work closely with the founders to build out both our self-hosted solution and the Cloud platform.

What’s a Pangolin!?

We are building in the open‑source infrastructure space. We are a network and ingress orchestration platform that helps developers manage core application networking/plumbing tasks such as exposure, health checks, load balancing, traffic shaping, SSH access, authentication, logging, and more. We are now expanding into premium features and a hosted cloud product

Check out us on GitHub: github.com/fosrl/pangolin

Our Stuff

• Typescript
• ExpressJS
• React / NextJS
• Tailwind Shadcn
• Go
• Wireguard
• Traefik
• Postgres / Sqlite
• AWS

Our Progress

We recently raised a sizable seed round and are backed by a vibrant community with over 15.1K+ GitHub Stars, 325K+ deployments, and 3.6k Discord members.

Role Description

The Founding Engineer will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction of the company and ensuring our software meets the highest standards of security and performance.

Key responsibilities include:

• Designing, developing, and maintaining core components of our secure access solutions.
• Writing code primarily in Go and TypeScript.
• Collaborating with the team on architecture design and future roadmap planning for both self-hosted and cloud offerings.
• Troubleshooting and resolving complex issues related to distributed systems, networking, and security.
• Actively engaging with the open-source community, providing support, and driving engagement on platforms like GitHub and Discord.

Qualifications

Important Experience

• Extensive experience with Go and TypeScript is critical.
• Hands-on experience with open-source projects
• Experience designing and working with distributed systems

Strong Background in Networking & Infrastructure

• Knowledge of networking concepts: tunneling, WireGuard, proxies, SSL/TLS.
• Familiarity with web identity and authentication standards: OAuth2, OIDC, SSO.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and operational technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, AWS).
• Interest or background in low-level networking/security and secure access solutions.

General

• Excellent teamwork and communication skills for working with founders and the community.
• Experience working in an early-stage startup environment is a significant plus.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Technology

What it actually does

We are a self-hosted tunneled reverse proxy server with identity and access control, designed to securely expose private resources on distributed networks. It connects to isolated networks through Wireguard tunnels, enabling easy access to remote services without opening ports.

Stuff we use

Typescript ExpressJS React / NextJS Tailwind Shadcn Go Wireguard Traefik Postgres / Sqlite AWS

Interview Process

1. We will review your provided materials

2. Complete a quick “get to know you interview”

3. A short, scoped, paid OSS project contribution

4. Onboard!