Founding Software Engineer (Full Stack) - EightByZero (Laval)

Location: Remote-friendly, Montreal, Quebec, Canada preferred · Type: Full-time About Eight by Zero Eight by Zero is the data middleware layer for insurance. We sit between insurers, brokers, employers, and the HR systems they all depend on, moving data between them reliably and securely. We are a seed-stage company funded by world-class investors, with key relationships across every major carrier in North America. We emerged from Diagram, the leading insurtech venture studio in North America and the team behind Dialogue and Nesto. The industry is at an inflection point. AI is rewriting how insurers exchange information with their customers, and we are building the infrastructure that makes that shift possible. Our customers range from mid-market companies to large enterprises, so our software has to handle both the speed of smaller deployments and the security, rigor, and data residency requirements of regulated enterprise buyers. The problems are real - Integration is the product. Every customer brings a different combination of upstream and downstream systems. A meaningful share of the work is designing clean, durable integrations against APIs we don’t control, productizing them, and making them reusable, observable, and recoverable when they misbehave. - Correctness matters. Insurance data drives benefits, payments, and compliance obligations. A silently dropped record is not an acceptable failure mode. We design for idempotency, reconciliation, and auditability from the start. - Multi-tenant, multi-region. We run separate production environments per region with data residency enforced at the infrastructure level. - Security is non-negotiable. Our customers’ security is paramount. We are SOC2 compliant, and we stay nimble in our day-to-day operations. What you’ll own You will be one of our first engineers, working closely with the founders on a small team. That means broad scope: backend, frontend, and the cloud infrastructure that runs them. A typical feature might involve modeling a new entity, exposing it through an API, building the UI, and shaping the deployment pipeline that ships it. It also means leverage. The patterns you set, the abstractions you choose, and the way you think about correctness, observability, and integration design will become how the rest of the team works as we grow. We are scaling quickly, and the engineers we hire first are on a clear path to becoming the technical leaders of the company. AI is core to how we work and what we ship We are an AI-first company in two distinct ways. - In how we build, AI is a daily tool, not a side experiment. We use Claude Code and similar agentic coding tools as part of how we design, write, review, and ship software. Our backlog, our integrations, and our deployment workflows are increasingly tied to AI-assisted pipelines, and we expect engineers to be fluent operators of these tools: knowing when to delegate to an agent, how to scope work for one, and how to verify what comes back. - In what we ship, AI capabilities are part of the product. We use modern LLMs to make insurance data flows smarter: extracting structure from messy inputs, reconciling records across systems, and giving customers interfaces that go beyond traditional forms-and-tables. The AI surface area of the product is growing, and engineers here have meaningful input into what we build with it. Fluency with these tools and the discipline to use them well (strong evaluations, clear prompts, careful handling of model outputs) is part of the job, not a bonus. What we look for Strong fundamentals You write production TypeScript fluently, on both the server and the browser. You have a working understanding of relational databases, schema design, migrations, transactions, and query performance, and you reach for SQL when it’s the right tool. You write tests as part of the feature, not after. Backend depth You’ve built and operated non-trivial services in production. You’re comfortable with a modern, opinionated server-side framework (we use NestJS). You think about authentication, authorization, observability, and graceful failure as part of the feature, not as a separate concern bolted on later. Frontend craft You’ve shipped real React applications. You’re comfortable with modern tooling, type-protected API consumption, and component design that survives more than one feature cycle. You understand that the UI is where customer trust is won or lost, and you care about the parts users actually feel: loading states, error handling, perceived performance. Cloud and infrastructure literacy You’ve worked in a major cloud ecosystem (we run on Google Cloud, but AWS or Azure backgrounds translate fine) and you understand the building blocks: managed compute, managed databases, object storage, message queues, load balancing, secrets, IAM. You’re comfortable reading and writing infrastructure-as-code, or you’re motivated to learn. We manage everything we run in Terraform. Engineering judgment You can read a codebase before you change it. You know when a problem deserves an abstraction and when it doesn’t. You’re comfortable saying “I don’t know yet” and following up with “here’s how I’ll find out.” You communicate well in writing (pull request descriptions, design notes, ADRs), because that’s how decisions get made and remembered. Bonus, not required - Experience in insurance, benefits, fintech, or other regulated B2B SaaS. - Background designing or operating integrations against third-party enterprise systems. What we offer - Meaningful founding-engineer equity. Real ownership in a company building infrastructure for a large, regulated, slow-to-change industry that is finally moving. - A competitive cash salary. - A direct line to the founders. Your input shapes the product, not just the code. - A clear path to technical leadership as the team grows. - Remote-friendly, with a strong preference for candidates who can spend regular time with the team in Montreal. How to apply Send your resume with a short note about something you’ve built and shipped recently, ideally something where you owned more than one layer of the stack. If your timing isn’t perfect today, reach out anyway. We are early enough that a great conversation is worth our time. Apply on Kit Job: kitjob.ca/job/2ouw28