Ignition Benefits
The AI-Native Benefits Brokerage
Founding Member of Technical Staff
About the role
About Ignition
Ignition Benefits is the AI-native employee-benefits brokerage for companies with 25–200 employees. We believe the $900B+ employer benefits market is broken: opaque, manual, and stuck in the 1990s. We are changing that with technology, transparency, and a radically better client experience. We're backed by Y Combinator and Equal Ventures, and our CEO previously built and sold Plated for $300M, the largest exit in Shark Tank history. You are joining a team that knows how to build and scale.
Where You'll Create Impact
- Build full-stack web apps our customers and our own ops team use every day
- Ship features end to end — architecture, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and beyond
- Build AI agents and durable workflows that run our back office — processes that run for weeks, wait on external systems, and resume where they left off
- Put agents in production, not in demos — human approval, evals, observability, etc
- Integrate third-party tools and external systems, proactively managing edge cases and risk
- Debug hard production issues and fix them for good
- Raise the bar through code reviews and technical discussions
What Sets You Up for Success
- 5+ years in full-stack engineering (TypeScript/Node.js/PostgreSQL/React and modern backend/frontend tooling and frameworks)
- Deep experience with complex business-logic products
- Solid understanding of system design, data schema design, and scalability
- Strong code quality standards and attention to detail — you can write code without AI, and you use it spec-driven, not vibe-coding
- Bonus: Python (FastAPI), LangGraph, Temporal; experience building ReAct loops, RAG
How You Operate
- Hybrid — 3 days in the office with the team, 2 remote
- Hardcore work ethic and high agency — you deploy daily, iterate fast, and don't wait for permission
- You own the product, not just the ticket — no PM will hand you a spec
- Curious about new AI tooling and how to make agentic workflows reliable
Why You'll Thrive Here
- Equity ownership in a YC-backed AI company disrupting the legacy employee-benefits industry
- Small, senior engineering team led by a CTO who scaled a startup engineering org from 2 to 50+
- Learn the industry from a founding team with decades in employee benefits
- Get the AI engineering experience the market values most, on real systems with real customers
- Your feedback shapes the product directly
- High-speed, high-trust environment with high expectations
Compensation
- Base: $180,000 – $200,000
- Equity: 0.15% – 0.35%
- Medical, dental and vision — we're a benefits brokerage, ours are worth having
- 401(k)
Join us: automate what's boring, solve what's hard, and build the agentic platform this industry has never had.
About the interview
Meet the Founding Team. Let’s vibe.
About Ignition Benefits
Ignition is an AI-native employee benefits brokerage for companies with under 200 employees. Health insurance is one of the largest line items these companies carry, and the brokers who sell it win on relationships rather than analysis. Employers absorb 15 to 40% rate increases year after year without ever seeing their own numbers. We have rebuilt the sales and back office to be AI-first. This market represents about $500B of market cap, and those businesses have not fundamentally changed in over 50 years. While scaling Plated, I wore every HR hat from doing payroll myself, to managing a PEO, to eventually hiring an employee benefits broker on our way to 1,500 employees. We wasted over $4M on benefits over 5 years, and I'm building Ignition to help companies under 200 employees avoid making my mistakes.
