Founding Engineer

About Releva

Releva buys profitable small businesses from founders who are retiring and holds them for the long run. No exit clock, no flipping. We install a new CEO, bring in technology and structure the previous owner never had time for, and share the equity with the people who run the business day to day.

Most tech companies sell software to businesses and spend years fighting through sales cycles. We do the opposite: we own the businesses, so the software we build has real users from the first day it ships. We are starting with private healthcare in Spain, a market of tens of thousands of profitable clinics whose owners are reaching retirement with no one to take over.

Two companies have proven this model works at scale: Constellation Software in Canada and Teamshares in the United States. No one has built it in Europe yet. That is what we are doing.

How we work

We are a small, senior team and we intend to stay that way for a long time. You work directly with the two co-founders, Bosco on the business side and Ale on product and technology. There is no layer of managers between you and the decisions.

We are not building towards a milestone or a sale. The capital behind Releva is patient, so we make decisions on a horizon of years, not quarters. That changes what we build and how we build it.

What we offer

• A say in what gets built and how, with direct access to the people making the calls.
• A small, flat, operating structure. No endless management layers.
• A dual role path: Employee or partner. You can be an employee, with a clear job description and defined hours, and do that job well. Or you can apply to be a partner: take equity in the business and become a Releva shareholder. The partner path carries higher expectations in return for a real stake in what we build.

Before you apply

We read every application ourselves and reply within 5 days, whether the answer is yes or no.

Releva hires on merit. We welcome applicants of every background, and we do not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation or any other protected characteristic.

The role

You will be the first software engineer at Releva. You take on the breadth of decisions that come with being first in seat, and you shape what the platform looks like in the next five years. The product is already in production but still early enough to shape from the ground up.

What you will work on

You will own the end-to-end development of our platform, from backend services and APIs to user-facing applications, plus the AI agents and internal tools that run on top.

You will sit with the people who use what you build. Every week, not every quarter. Their problems become your problems before they become tickets.

What you build helps these businesses run and improve through their next chapter, with consequences you see in months, not years.

Our stack

The platform is built on the Node.js ecosystem (TypeScript, Postgres, modern frontend frameworks) and is already in production. You will inherit the existing codebase, evolve it, and have the freedom to introduce new components where they make sense. We chose this stack to ship fast with a small team. We change it when something else makes us faster.

AI is part of how we build the product and how the product runs. The platform uses AI to operate. We use AI to build the platform. Our bet is that one engineer working this way produces what a team of three to five does at companies that have not made the same bet.

We move fast because we want to learn fast. Shipping to production is how we test what works in the business, not how we measure ourselves.

What we're looking for

• 5 to 8 years of experience as a software engineer
• Prior experience as one of the first engineers at an early-stage startup
• Strong written and spoken English; working knowledge of Spanish is a plus
• Comfortable with ambiguity, rapid context switching, and direct decision-making
• Based in Madrid or willing to be, with the right to work in the EU.

This is not for everyone. The work is intense, the ambiguity is real, and the structure you may be used to does not exist here. If that energizes you, we should talk.

Compensation

• €65-80K base, depending on experience.
• If you want to be a partner: Founding equity with vesting.