Founding Senior Backend Engineer

Company:
COGENSY – Consensus‑Oriented Global Engagement Network - Safeguarding You

Location:
Fully Remote (US / Canada / Europe overlap)

Type:
Part‑time pre‑funding → Full‑time post‑funding

About COGENSY

COGENSY is building a new kind of communications layer: a way for thousands (eventually millions) of people to
debate, decide, and collaborate in real time
—with a
tamper‑evident, machine‑readable record
of what happened.

The aim is simple but ambitious: give institutions, communities, and AI systems a trustworthy signal of
what people agree on, what they don't, and why
.

We're pre‑money, small, and focused. The immediate objective is an MVP that proves we can:

• Handle large‑scale participation without devolving into noise
• Produce a verifiable, tamper‑evident trail of events and decisions
• Expose that signal cleanly via APIs and real‑time feeds

To get there, we're looking for a
founding‑level Senior Backend Engineer
who can own the backend stack end‑to‑end.

The Stack

Backend:
Python / Django

Database:
PostgreSQL

Real‑time / Caching:
Redis

Frontend communication:

• REST/JSON for main operations
• WebSockets via
  Django Channels + Redis
  for real‑time updates

You'll be the person who makes this backbone real and reliable.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement the
  core backend for the MVP
  :
• Models and APIs for posts, supports, escalations, sessions, and audit trails
• REST/JSON endpoints consumed by our React (or other JS) frontend
• Build
  real‑time capabilities
  using Django Channels + Redis:
• WebSocket endpoints for thousands of concurrent users
• Grouping, fan‑out, and back‑pressure patterns that actually hold up
• Implement the first version of our
  tamper‑evident ledger
  :
• Append‑only events, hash chains, provenance fields
• Verification endpoints that can be called by the frontend and external verifiers
• Lay the foundations of
  observability and resilience
  :
• Logging, metrics, basic rate‑limiting and guardrails
• Schema design and migrations with an eye toward future scale
• Work closely with the product and frontend side to keep the vertical slice thin, testable, and demo‑ready.

You won't be handed a rigid blueprint. You'll be shaping the architecture and standards as we go.

What We're Looking For

Must‑have

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with
  3+ years in Python/Django
• Strong track record designing and shipping
  REST/JSON APIs
• Solid experience with
  PostgreSQL
  (indexes, migrations, query design, basic tuning)
• Hands‑on experience with
  Redis
  (caching and/or pub/sub)
• Real‑time experience: you've implemented
  WebSockets, SSE, or similar
  in production
• Comfort with
  event‑driven patterns
  (even if not Kafka yet): thinking in terms of events, streams, and idempotent consumers
• A strong bias toward
  simple, observable designs
  over clever, fragile ones
• Clear communication and ease working in a small, distributed team

Nice‑to‑have

• Django Channels in production
• Background in
  audit logging, cryptographic hashes, or tamper‑evident / high‑integrity systems
• Exposure to Kafka or other streaming platforms (for later phases)
• Comfort with Docker and deploying to a major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Prior founding‑team or early‑stage startup experience, especially in civic tech, infra, or real‑time products

Compensation & Structure

We're early, so we're transparent:

Pre‑funding (now):

• US$125/hour
  via a pre‑money
  Service Promissory Note (SPN)
• Part‑time (roughly 15–25 hours/week), remote, contractor engagement

Post‑funding (conversion to full‑time):

• US‑centered base salary:
  US$170,000 – US$210,000
  per year (DOE and location)
• Competitive benefits package (health, PTO, etc., aligned with US norms)
• Founding‑level equity:
  5%
  ownership in the company

Details of structure, timing, and benefits will be finalized together as we move from SPN to full‑time, but the intent is clear: this is a
founding‑level backend role
, with ownership to match.

Why This Might be Interesting

• You want to work on a problem that actually matters:
  collective intelligence, governance, and AI alignment
  , not just another feed or checkout flow.
• You enjoy owning a stack, not just contributing tickets into a black box.
• You like the challenge of making real‑time, high‑integrity systems behave nicely in the wild.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity and honest about trade‑offs.

Interested? Hit the 'Apply Now' button - we've love to meet you