Founding Engineer

Doorman helps K-12 schools keep students focused by blocking cell-phone distractions, at a moment when schools are under new legal pressure to actually enforce phone policies. A student taps a phone on an NFC tag at the classroom door. That puts the phone into the school's chosen restriction mode and logs attendance at the same time. Attendance writes back to the student information system, so Doorman sits inside a workflow schools already run every period.

Pouches are expensive and clunky, collecting phones creates liability, and teacher enforcement is inconsistent. Backed by Reach Capital, Doorman went from zero to 40 districts in under 12 months. A team of about 3 onboarded 50 new customers in a single back-to-school month. It is growing across Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ohio, and California, and is raising again in November.

The CEO studied electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley, was an early design hire at Ramp, worked on GitHub Copilot and at BMW, and was head of product at TeachShare. The CTO studied computer science at UC Irvine and architected the patent-pending restriction system. They have built software for schools together since they were 16. The mission is modern software infrastructure for schools: phone enforcement first, then school operations and the student information system market. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2025, in New York.

Doorman is hiring its first full-time engineer. They want an all-around athlete who can take any problem, including one that will look different in three months, and learn the tech required to solve it. The proof points are reliable attendance writeback to every major student information system, and onboarding a new district in days rather than weeks.

The core work is agentic automation against legacy school infrastructure. Platforms such as Aspen, Genesis, and Rediker often have no public API for writing attendance back, so you are making APIs out of old web software. Browser agents run in isolated browsers, pull data between systems, and have to survive race conditions when reads and writes overlap. You also build the Flutter app on iOS and Android: Focus Mode through a network-layer VPN restriction, and Lockdown Mode through iOS single-app mode and Android accessibility services, right at the edge of what the platforms allow. You architect the system with the CTO. The stack is Firebase and Firestore, Express.js on Google Cloud Run, Cloud Tasks, Next.js, and Flutter. You join calls with principals, teachers, and IT directors, ship from what you hear, and eventually own whole product areas, such as the student information system layer, and set that roadmap with the founders.

The spike they weight first is backend architecture: strong system design, comfort designing the backend, and reliable work across messy legacy data sources. Reliability and an SRE habit are a strong plus, because schools depend on this bell to bell. Polished UX is the valued second spike. The current preference is a promising junior, about a new grad to one year, hungry and articulate, though a proven senior pushes compensation higher. You have shipped production software end to end. You learn new frameworks fast. You can think and explain an approach live. You take very direct feedback. K-12, student information systems, system-level mobile APIs, or browser automation are pluses. A one-slice specialist, a relaxed big-tech pace, or someone who cannot design a backend is a miss.

In office in New York every day, with travel to schools. Visa sponsorship is limited. Equity is about 0.5% to 1.5%. Posted work intensity is 9-9-6. Experience they have in mind is about 1 to 5 years. The process is an intro with the CEO, a live system-design conversation, then a paid work trial: day one is an architecture problem and a feature from a design, and day two is fixing real customer bugs from the past week.