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
Weโre 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. Itโs a domain thatโs been stuck on PDFs, clipboards, and software that looks like it was designed in 2008. Weโre changing that.
Weโre 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. Weโre 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. Weโre building on TypeScript, Postgres, Anthropic, Gemini, and AWS (ECS, Amplify, CloudFront). You donโt 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 youโve 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, youโll fit in.
Youโll take a problem, such as โwe need a workflow engine for incident responseโ, and own the shape of the solution including architecture, tradeoffs, implementation, and rollout. Weโll talk through it together, but youโre the one driving and owning it.
Talking to customers, end users and stakeholders - campus safety directors, investigators, emergency managers. Youโll hear their challenges directly. The best engineers weโve worked with treat this as a superpower, not a tax.
Requirements
Background and Experience
Youโve 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 youโre happy to argue them, and to update them when someoneโs 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 donโt need handholding. Nobodyโs going to assign you tickets. If youโre the kind of person who thrives on being told exactly what to build and when, this wonโt 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. Weโll be straightforward about numbers early in the process.
- Benefits. Extended health/dental benefits plan.
- Runway and stability. Weโre backed by a growth equity firm with a strong track record of success in B2B SaaS. Weโre not going to disappear in six months.
- Actual ownership of what you build. Your fingerprints will be all over the product.
- Hybrid work style. Weโll get together in person weekly if youโre 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.