Company: Paloma Software (palomaparties.com)

Location: Remote or Ottawa

Type: Full-time

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About Paloma

Paloma makes it easier for people to plan and book private parties and events, and easier for venues and vendors to deliver incredible experiences at scale.

We started with a problem we ran into ourselves: finding the right venue for a moderately sized gathering is not nearly as simple as it should be. That quickly led to a deeper realization that the complexity exists on both sides, and there are considerable inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Our customers are hospitality experts. They know that incredible service, trust, and attention to detail are the foundation of great events, and Paloma is not trying to replace that. We're building a system that supports those relationships, that uses technology where it makes sense to remove friction and adapt to modern guest behaviour. We want to make the personal interactions our guests and customers have that much richer, clearer, and more memorable.

Our vision is to make it as easy to book an event for fifty as it is a table for two. We have early product-market fit, the resources to scale, and are just getting started.

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The Role

We're looking for a Founding Developer to take the kernel of what's already been validated with our early customers and help it blossom into a guest-centric, AI-powered, full-fledged event booking and management platform. You'll evaluate what exists today, where we need to go next, and where the biggest opportunities are to build an intuitive system that can constantly improve both the guest experience and our customers' businesses.

You'll bring strong product and design instincts to your work, thinking carefully about interaction, clarity, and how decisions land with real users, not just how they're implemented.

As a founding team member, you'll help shape our engineering culture, technical direction, and how we think about building software from first principles.

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What You'll Build

Below is by no means exhaustive, just a sampling of areas under active development.

Vendor Onboarding Experience – High-fidelity onboarding for busy operators, including voice-driven assistants for fast, accurate information capture. Observing real usage and iterating quickly is key to unlocking fast time-to-value and meaningful adoption, with room to expand value over time.

Guest–Vendor Communications – AI-assisted communication across email and messaging: drafting and auto-completion, prioritization, deep inbox integration via OAuth, and automatic, timely follow-ups at key event checkpoints.

Insights – Identifying anomalies in usage data and session recordings, surfacing customer anecdotes, event improvement opportunities, and seasonal or macro trends.

Guest Experience – Obsessing over every click, every moment of confusion, and every point of delight, ensuring our service is the best possible first touchpoint guests have with a venue, and that managing an event is straightforward and stress-free.

Venue Discovery – Helping guests find the right venue, and helping vendors be present on the agent-enabled web through MCP and other emerging technologies.

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How We Build

It's safe to assume that AI and agents will underpin everything, from the developer experience to the customer experience. Given our team is small and has no established tie-ins, we're free to use the best tools available at any given hour to power our product development machine, provided they make sense for the team as a whole.

See this recent post if you're curious about the tech used in Paloma.

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What You'll Do

Architecture

Ensuring the right technical foundations are in place as the product evolves. You'll look for opportunities, make and own big decisions after clearly articulating trade-offs, evaluate and integrate new technologies, and continuously balance technical debt with velocity.

Development

Building new features end-to-end, from guest-facing interfaces through backend systems and integrations. You'll find and fix bugs, write and run tests, migrate data when needed, and integrate it all all into an ever improving CI/CD system.

Operations

Learning from how the service is actually used is essential to delivering on its promise at scale. This includes monitoring usage, analyzing logs, session recordings, and signals across the system, and evolving our tooling with better automation and observability so insights surface naturally rather than through manual effort.

Customer Success

Working closely with real customers to understand how Paloma fits into their day-to-day workflows. This means leading and joining customer conversations, digging into real event flows, and translating feedback, friction, and edge cases into product and system improvements. You'll help ensure what we build is not just technically sound, but genuinely useful, intuitive, and trusted by the venues and guests relying on it.

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What We're Looking For

Must Haves

• 5+ years of professional software development experience

• Exceptional full stack development experience in JavaScript/Typescript/React/Node

• RESTful API design and integration

• Serverless backend expertise

• No-SQL database experience

• Extensive experience building unit, integration and end-to-end testing for your work

• Building production software with AI Copilots (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.)

• Some production prompt engineering and evals experience

• AWS or cloud platform experience

• Comfort working in a monorepo and managing shared codebases

Great to have

• AWS mastery

• Experience with meta-frameworks like Next.js or similar

• Responsive Design Experience

• Strong product and design taste, with excellent judgement around interaction, clarity, and polish

• Event driven systems (EventBridge or similar)

• Production DynamoDB experience

• Experience with observability tools, feature flags, A/B testing, or other OODA style feature rollout

• Frontend Performance Optimization, Web Vitals, reducing bundle size, caching

• Infrastructure as code experience, (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform)

• AI Evals at scale

• Production RAG experience, Vector DBs

Nice to haves

• Hospitality or events industry experience

• Real-time web experience (WebSockets or SSE)

• CD, CodeBuild/CodePipeline or GitHub actions

• Custom email crafting systems and infrastructure (React Email, SES)

• Early-stage startup experience

• Strong product intuition for consumer and/or non-techincal-user facing software

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Why you're a great fit

You've worked at startups and have sweated through uncertainty, and have seen fruitful rewards. You value business impact above all else.

You're a generalist, and thrive on ambiguity. You will wear whatever hat is necessary even if you need to learn how to wear it.

You value simplicity. If something is working, let it keep working, but surface opportunities for improvement at the right moment.

You hold strong opinions, loosely held. Perhaps you thought AI could never replace you, but then you had another thought.

You're self directed, but recognize check-ins and brainstorming with team members have many compounding benefits.

You're transparent, you openly share what's keeping you busy, where you have concerns, learnings, and mistakes you make, all in an effort to engender similar growth and collaboration from others.

You understand deeply the cost and trade-offs of refactoring production software. You also recognize modern AI tooling is changing some of these trade-offs, and are active in exploring these opportunities.

You prefer readable code over clever abstractions. You know when to use a library, and when to produce code, and have recent examples of how your mindset has shifted on this.

You love getting things done-done, and do your best to expectation-set that the final 10% is often much of the work.

You're an excellent communicator, thoughtful about the downstream impact of your work. Whether it's a code change that affects others or the words and punctuation of an email, you think carefully about how it will be read and experienced by a customer.

You're eager to build products for real people, while staying on top of technology and as sharp as ever.

You're aware of your blind spots, and excited about shaping early engineering culture. You enjoy mentoring others, sharing knowledge, and seeing the teams' productivity improve over your own.

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Our Culture

Guest and Customer Obsession

Customer obsession is a given in software, but our space demands guest and customer obsession. The guests is our customers' customer, every detail of their experience - from first touch to final interaction matters. We adhere to the unreasonable hospitality mindset and push past norms to create delight, learning deeply by asking "why" as many times as it takes in order to innovate.

Life-Work Balance

We're building for the long term with practices that scale; no hero culture, no endless crunches, no always-on expectations. Deep work time is protected, but we recognize home and family life will always come first.

We believe time fully off is essential to long term productivity and mental health. We are also designing the team to be as resilient as the software itself, with no single point of failure, and being offline helps exercise this.

This is a startup, there will always be moments of pressure and urgency. Our approach is to build a resilient team with shared goals that can back each other up, which is our formula for long-term success.

People First

Achieving great outcomes over the long term means spending a lot of time together, and enjoying that time spent. We'd rather hire great people who want to be great to work with. That matters more to us than resumes or past deliverables, and it's why this role is full-time rather than contract.

Transparent, Trustworthy Mindset

Our company isn't built to squeeze pennies out of processes. We want to make a positive and lasting impact in the hospitality industry. This applies to the type of work we deliver, how our business earns its revenue (fairly), and who we're accountable to (our investors, whom we love because they are also good people).

We strive to understand the externalities our product carries and ensure our customers are always fully aware that their data is owned by them and never sold.

We Like to Party, Learn

We started Paloma because we value gathering with people and wanted to apply our skills while learning deeply in this space. When appropriate, we celebrate wins responsibly and learn from losses in a data-focused, blameless, and continuously improving culture.

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Hiring Process

We have great respect for time, and want to focus on finding the best mutual fit for this role. The below may be adjusted based on your skills and experience.

1. Initial Conversation (45 min)

Get to know each other. Discuss your background, our vision, and what you're looking for in your next role.

2. Technical Deep Dive (60 min)

Explore your past work and technical approach. We'll discuss real challenges you've solved, architectural decisions, and how you think about building systems.

3. Build Together (90 min)

Work on a realistic problem similar to our daily challenges. You can choose the format:

• Live collaboration: Build something together in real-time

• Take-home: Up to 3 hours on your own schedule with follow-up discussion

We focus on problem-solving approach, code quality, and communication, not speed or algorithmic puzzles.

4. Team & Vision Alignment (45 min)

Meet the team and dig into working style, company vision, and mutual fit. This is for you to evaluate us as much as us evaluating you.

5. Final Discussion (30 min)

Cover compensation, equity, logistics, and next steps. If we're both excited, we'll move quickly to an offer.

Rough time commitment to reach offer stage: ~4-5 hours over 2-3 weeks

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Compensation and Benefits

Salary and Equity

This is a founding-stage role, and compensation reflects that: $130 – $180k CAD depending on experience and impact, with meaningful stock options for those building with us from the ground up.

Benefits and Perks

• Group Health Benefits

• PTO - 4 weeks a year paid, and you're encouraged to use it

• Equipment - MacBook Air / Pro, monitors, accessories

• Office - we'll have a place to gather as often as needed

• Fully Remote or Hybrid

• Flexible hours - core overlap time, but otherwise work when you're at your best

• Quarterly (or more frequently) offsites

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Work Environment

The core team is in Ottawa, Ontario. We value in-person collaboration, but also deep work to enable craftsmanship above having butts in seats. We want to build the best team possible, so we'll all travel to Ottawa or other mutually agreed upon locations to get in sync as needed.

If you're in Ottawa and prefer working from an office, we'll make sure you have access to one —whether that's shared coworking space or a dedicated office as the team grows.

We use Slack for inter-team text communication, but fully respect DND and off-hours settings. We will use Google Meet when not in person. We favor ad hoc meetings to scheduled meetings, and aim to limit and scrutinize all the latter.

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Why Join Paloma?

We're a small, scrappy team building technology for people, using the best tools available. We care deeply about designing and building a business that has impact, supports a good life, and is shaped by working with people we respect and learn from while building products for real people.

We've established product-market fit with early customers and are ready to scale. Building technology in 2026 is exhilarating, and applying that energy to a people-centric product at the earliest stage is a rare opportunity to help shape something meaningful, with the potential to grow into something truly significant.

Apply With

• A brief note about why you're interested

• Your resume or LinkedIn profile

• Links to projects or code you're proud of

• Any questions about the role or company

We're actively looking to fill this role and will respond promptly.