Aqua is a graduate from YC’s S21 batch. We just finished raising our seed round and are looking for people who want to help us revolutionize the $11T private equity industry.
We want people who will make a difference in the earliest stages of the company. As an early employee of Aqua, you will have an opportunity to make a major impact across areas including engineering, product strategy and culture. You will play a key role in the product decision making process alongside the founders and have ownership over critical parts of the product.
If you are inspired to solve challenging problems and passionate about making private equity investing more equitable, come join us!
Skills: Python, Distributed Systems, Software Architecture, Microservices, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
About Aqua
Aqua is the operating system for wealth channel alternatives. We are building the platform for independent broker-dealers (IBDs) and independent financial advisors (RIAs) to invest in alternative assets. We are on track to process $5B in new transactions for 2025, with customer logos including some of the largest RIAs/BDs in the nation and asset managers including Blackstone, Apollo, JLL, Blue Owl, etc.
About the Role
We're hiring a talented and dynamic founding engineer to help us reimagine how alternative investments are managed. The alternative investment industry is notoriously manual and operationally complex—we're building technology to change that.
You'll be responsible for:
- Developing our core product that streamlines complex investment workflows for clients
- Building intelligent automation systems
- Creating the technical foundation that enables institutional-quality service delivery at scale
- Owning end-to-end projects from conception to deployment, working directly with the CTO
- Shaping our technical architecture and engineering culture as a founding team member
This is a rare opportunity to define how a modern alternative investment platform should work, building both client-facing products and the operational infrastructure that makes scalable service possible.
Who You Are
- 3-5+ years building scalable applications, ideally at fast-growing startups
- Product-minded—you stay connected to users and business context, using technology to solve real pain points
- Thrive in high-autonomy, ambiguous environments and move fast
- Measure success by organizational impact, not lines of code
- Write robust, high-quality code and design scalable, reliable systems
- Comfortable working across the stack when needed
- Experienced with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems architecture
- Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Familiar with AI-driven applications and agentic workflows
- Willing to roll up your sleeves and do whatever it takes to solve problems
Bonus Points:
- Experience architecting and building AI applications or agents
- Strong UI/UX intuition and have built polished interfaces
Our Stack
- Frontend: Angular, React
- Backend: Python, Express (Node.js)
- Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform
- Database: PostgreSQL, MySQL