First engineer on the team
What a startup teaches you when there is nobody else to do the thing: engineering is rarely limited to a job title.
My first job was as the first engineer on a small healthcare startup's team. The title said full-stack developer. The job said: whatever needs doing.
One day I was writing backend code. The next I was fixing DNS records because the site was unreachable. Then testing the app for security holes, then setting up a server, then sitting in a meeting about what the product should become. There was no line between "development" and "responsibility". If it was broken and I could learn to fix it, it was mine.
Two people shaped how I think about that time.
The founder, Bhagath, kept pushing me past whatever I was comfortable with. Every time something felt like enough, he handed me something slightly bigger. Most of what I can do today traces back to him trusting me before I'd earned it.
The CTO, Raja, had three decades of building software behind him. He didn't teach frameworks. He taught fundamentals: how a system should be shaped, why simple beats clever, how to think before typing. Sitting next to him was an education you can't buy.
What I took from those years is the sentence I still measure myself against:
Real engineering is rarely limited to a job title. It's understanding the whole system and helping wherever the system needs you.
That's why I ended up caring more about the connections between things — software to network, machine to machine, hardware to software — than about any single part. A startup doesn't let you stay in one box. I'm grateful it didn't.