Build the next generation of financial services.

Founding Engineer

Engineering · Helsinki / Hybrid · €4,000–7,000/month + equity

Location

Helsinki, Finland (city-centre office) / Hybrid.

Salary and equity

€4,000–7,000/month, with equity of 0.5–2 %, standard 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. Exact number based on experience.

What

Join us in building a new generation of financial services. Vahva's belief is simple: financial services work best when customers' and companies' interests are fully aligned. We're starting with insurance, because we think it's one of the clearest places to prove that financial services can be done differently, and better. Insurance is our starting point, not our end goal.

Why us

Vahva is a Finnish fintech company built to put customers first, starting with how insurance works. We see insurance as a modern financial product, not a legacy category to maintain. Insurance and cashback are the beginning of a long, healthy customer relationship, one we build our wider portfolio of products around.

We're a seed-stage company, which means your voice shapes where we go next. You'll have real influence over decisions and over our customers' lives. We're building the founding team now. Join us.

What you'll do

• Build Vahva's consumer platform from the ground up, working side by side with the founder. You are the founding engineer in a growth-stage company bringing a new kind of insurance concept to market, first in Finland under the Vahva brand.
• Ship product end-to-end: design, implement, deploy, and operate the services behind our cashback and insurance products (vahva.fi), which reward customers with real money for claim-free months, and the car-insurance products the platform grows into.
• Shape the architecture of a platform that has to be reliable, secure, and scalable in a regulated industry, and ready to expand from Finland to the Nordics and beyond.
• Take AI-first engineering from idea to practice: build AI into the platform and into how we work, from the ground up rather than bolted on afterward.
• Set the engineering culture and lay the foundations the future team will build on: how we build, test, ship, and run software.
• Work openly and close to our earliest users, who help develop the service with us; what they experience each month is the direct result of what you ship.

What we look for

• A senior product engineer who has built and run production systems end-to-end and is comfortable being the one who makes it work, from API design through distributed and event-driven architectures to operating enterprise-grade, cloud-native systems in production.
• Experience taking an early-stage product from zero to launch: you make pragmatic calls, cut the right corners, and keep quality where it matters.
• An AI-native way of building: AI-assisted development tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar coding agents) are already part of how you work, and you've designed, built, or orchestrated AI agents and agentic workflows, with a solid grasp of prompt and context engineering, RAG patterns, tool-calling agents, and multi-agent systems.
• The foundations that let a small team ship fast and safely: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and automated deployments, and a working command of observability, security engineering, and cloud governance.
• An ownership mindset: you want the responsibility and the upside of a founding role, not a ticket queue. You take end-to-end responsibility for outcomes, from delivery quality and reliability to long-term maintainability, and you create leverage for every engineer who joins after you.
• Care for the trust our product runs on: money, insurance, and personal data demand security and correctness. Experience with fintech or other regulated domains is a clear advantage.
• Fluent English; Finnish is a strong plus in a product built first for the Finnish market.

Technologies

Applicants are expected to have knowledge of:

1. TypeScript
2. Node.js
3. React
4. PostgreSQL
5. Building cloud-based B2C products
6. AI engineering, applied from the ground up

Where we are today

We're moving from pre-launch to launch and are now onboarding our first paying customers. This is a rare opportunity to join with zero technical legacy: you'll define how things are truly done, together with our earliest customers.

How to apply

Apply with the form below: name, email, phone and CV. In your CV or cover note, tell us about something you've built and shipped end-to-end: what you chose, what you cut, and how it ran in production. Total compensation is competitive for a founding role, and equity in the company is available on top of salary.

Process

1. CV review. Although we are an AI-native company, people review the CVs. AI doesn't.
2. Interview with the founder and the founding team
3. Role-specific test in a real environment: real code, real data, real constraints
4. Joining the company

Designer / Junior Designer

Product · Helsinki / Hybrid · €3,000–4,500/month

Location

Helsinki, Finland (city-centre office) / Hybrid.

Salary range

€3,000–4,500/month, exact number based on experience.

What

Join us in designing a new generation of financial services. Vahva's belief is simple: financial services work best when customers' and companies' interests are fully aligned. We're starting with insurance, because we think it's one of the clearest places to prove that financial services can be done differently, and better. Insurance is our starting point, not our end goal.

Why us

Vahva is a Finnish fintech company built to put customers first, starting with how insurance works. We see insurance as a modern financial product, not a legacy category to maintain. Insurance and cashback are the beginning of a long, healthy customer relationship, one we build our wider portfolio of products around.

We're a seed-stage company, which means you'll see the whole product rather than one corner of it. You'll work directly with the founding team and our first engineers, and the designs you make reach real customers in days, not quarters. This role spans designer and junior designer: strong juniors are genuinely welcome. You will be given real work, real review, and the time to get good, and the quality bar stays visible the whole way.

What you'll do

• Design the product, UX, and visual layer of Vahva's consumer platform (vahva.fi): the cashback and insurance products that pay customers real money for claim-free months, and the car-insurance products the platform grows into.
• Work inside our existing design system: use it, extend it, and question it. You're not expected to redesign it on day one; you are expected to ask why it looks the way it does.
• Take design tasks end-to-end at your own scale: understand the problem, sketch the flows, design the screens, and follow them into production with the engineers who build them in React. You'll have someone alongside you for the parts that are new.
• Make insurance legible. Terms, pricing, claims, and cashback are exactly the kind of content that turns confusing by default; your job is to make them plain.
• Use AI tooling as a normal part of the craft from day one. We build AI into the platform and into how we work, and you'll learn that way of working here rather than being asked to arrive with it.
• Grow into ownership: as you learn the domain, you take larger pieces, and the scope of what is yours grows with you. For a junior, that path runs from well-scoped screens to owning whole flows.

What we look for

• Early in your career or a few years in, from your first design role to mid-level, including strong self-taught paths. What you have designed matters more to us than where you studied.
• A portfolio with at least one real project, professional, academic, or personal, that you can walk us through: what you chose, what you cut, and what you'd change now.
• Working fluency in a modern interface design tool such as Figma, and enough understanding of the web to design things that can actually be built. You don't need to write React, but you should want to understand the people who do.
• Comfort with AI-assisted design tools, or genuine eagerness to learn them properly. We'll teach the depth; the interest has to be yours.
• Care about clarity. This product handles money, insurance, and personal data, so "it looks nice" isn't the bar: customers have to understand what they're buying. We'd rather you ask than guess.
• The habit of asking for feedback early and the willingness to be critiqued. In a small team, unblocking yourself fast is worth more than polishing alone for three days.
• Fluent English; Finnish is a strong plus in a product built first for the Finnish market.

Where we are today

We're moving from pre-launch to launch and are now onboarding our first paying customers. The design system is young and there is no legacy to inherit, so the things you design are the things customers use.

How to apply

Send your application, CV, portfolio, and salary expectations to contact@vahva.fi. Tell us about something you've designed, at work, at school, or on your own time: what it does, what you found hard, and what you'd do differently now. A link to live work is welcome and never required.

Process

1. CV and portfolio review
2. Interview with the founder and the founding team
3. Design discussion
4. Joining the company

Go-to-Market / Sales

Go-to-market · Helsinki / Hybrid

Location

Helsinki, Finland (city-centre office) / Hybrid.

What

Join us in bringing a new generation of financial services to market. Vahva's belief is simple: financial services work best when customers' and companies' interests are fully aligned. We're starting with insurance, because we think it's one of the clearest places to prove that financial services can be done differently, and better. Insurance is our starting point, not our end goal.

Why us

Vahva is a Finnish fintech company built to put customers first, starting with how insurance works. We see insurance as a modern financial product, not a legacy category to maintain. Insurance and cashback are the beginning of a long, healthy customer relationship, one we build our wider portfolio of products around.

We're a seed-stage company, which means you build our go-to-market from the ground up instead of running someone else's playbook. You'll work directly with the founder, and what you try this week reaches real customers this week.

What you'll do

• Win Vahva's first customers: sell Koti+ and our cashback products directly, and learn what makes people say yes.
• Run marketing end-to-end: campaigns, social, content, and events. Try things fast, measure what works, and double down on it.
• Build the partnerships and channels that bring customers to Vahva at scale.
• Tell our story plainly: cashback for claim-free months, one monthly price, and what that means in a customer's everyday life.
• Bring what you hear from customers back to the founder and the product team, and help shape pricing, messaging, and the customer journey.
• Use AI tooling as a normal part of the work, from research and outreach to content and analysis.
• Grow into ownership: as the results come, the channels and targets that are yours grow with you.

What we look for

• Drive and hunger. You want to build something from zero, and you judge yourself by results.
• Early in your career or a few years in. Sales, marketing, or growth experience from a startup, an agency, a student organisation, or your own projects all counts.
• You like talking to people: calls, meetings, and events give you energy, and a no doesn't slow you down.
• A feel for numbers: you track what you do and know which channel brought which customer.
• Clear, plain communication. We sell money and insurance, so customers have to understand exactly what they're buying.
• An ownership mindset: you take a goal and run with it, and you ask early when you're stuck.
• Fluent Finnish and English: our first customers are Finnish.

Where we are today

We're moving from pre-launch to launch and are now onboarding our first paying customers. There is no go-to-market playbook to inherit: the channels, messages, and routines you build are the ones Vahva grows on.

How to apply

Apply with the form below: name, email, phone and CV. In your CV or cover note, tell us about something you sold, launched, or grew: what you did, what worked, what didn't, and your salary expectations.

Process

1. CV review
2. Interview with the founder and the founding team
3. A role-specific task: a real go-to-market challenge
4. Joining the company