Founding Engineer

Role: Founding Engineer

Reports to: CTO / Co-Founder

Company: Legio (getlegio.com), backed by Klass Ventures (klass.com)

Location: Greater Toronto Area, ON (1x per week in our Toronto office)

Type: Full Time / Permanent

Compensation: Competitive market base salary plus equity and benefits

We’re Legio. We build software for safety and security operations teams - the people who respond when something goes wrong at a university or hospital campus. Incidents, investigations, dispatch, reporting, the whole operational spine. It’s a domain that’s been stuck on PDFs, clipboards, and software that looks like it was designed in 2008. We’re changing that.

We’re a small team inside Klass Ventures, a well-funded venture studio out of Toronto. That means we have runway, real conversations already in motion, and the freedom to build something that lasts. We’re looking for our first Founding Engineer to help us build it.

Responsibilities

Shipping real features end-to-end. Backend, frontend, infrastructure, whatever the problem needs. Leading architecture and design decisions. We’re building on TypeScript, Postgres, Anthropic, Gemini, and AWS (ECS, Amplify, CloudFront). You don’t need to know all of it on day one - you need to be the kind of person who can pick up whatever the problem needs and get good at it fast.

We are using AI seriously. Not as a party trick. Claude Code, Codex, multi agentic workflows - we build with these tools every day, and a lot of what we ship has AI features inside it too. If you’ve been quietly leveling up your AI-assisted development game on the side and want to do it full-time with people who take it as seriously as you do, you’ll fit in.

You’ll take a problem, such as “we need a workflow engine for incident response”, and own the shape of the solution including architecture, tradeoffs, implementation, and rollout. We’ll talk through it together, but you’re the one driving and owning it.

Talking to customers, end users and stakeholders - campus safety directors, investigators, emergency managers. You’ll hear their challenges directly. The best engineers we’ve worked with treat this as a superpower, not a tax.

Requirements

Background and Experience

You’ve probably done one of these:

• Been a founding or early engineer at a startup that shipped real things (whether or not it worked out).
• Started something of your own - a company, a serious side project, an open-source initiative people actually use.
• Been the person at a bigger company who shipped the important stuff while everyone else was in meetings.

You write clean code and you care about it, but you also know when to ship and move on. You have strong opinions about tools, trade-offs, and taste - and you’re happy to argue them, and to update them when someone’s right. You have 5+ years of professional working experience.

You have strong architecture experience. You can design technical standards, create blueprints, decision logs, and technical roadmaps; communicate tradeoffs and align stakeholders.

You have mastered AI tooling. You are all in on agentic coding, and you have multiple agents running simultaneously to accomplish tasks for you. You are AI Native in your work habits, and building AI tools in your free time for personal use, side projects, daily work, etc.

You don’t need handholding. Nobody’s going to assign you tickets. If you’re the kind of person who thrives on being told exactly what to build and when, this won’t be fun for you. You are a builder and you are looking for a hands-on, high-impact building opportunity.

Benefits

What we offer

• Competitive Market Salary. We benchmark against senior engineers at funded startups.
• Equity. A meaningful amount. We’ll be straightforward about numbers early in the process.
• Benefits. Extended health/dental benefits plan.
• Runway and stability. We’re backed by a growth equity firm with a strong track record of success in B2B SaaS. We’re not going to disappear in six months.
• Actual ownership of what you build. Your fingerprints will be all over the product.
• Hybrid work style. We’ll get together in person weekly if you’re in the GTA.
• Quality tools. Whatever hardware, AI subscriptions, and software you need to be successful.

Existing Job Opening - this job posting is for an existing vacancy.

AI Use - Klass Ventures / Legio may use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to support parts of the hiring process. This may include AI assisting in the review of applications, analyzing resumes and improving the recruitment process. These tools assist our talent team but do not replace human judgement. All hiring decisions are made by human team members.