Founding Engineer / Technical Lead, US — Palo Alto

What you’ll do

You’ll build and own mond’s US/global platform. The existing service is live in Japan with real users, real data, and a real payments ledger; your job is to design and build the global platform that lets mond scale to a global audience. You’ll work closely with the CEO in Palo Alto and the Tokyo Tech Lead — one global engineering team, with the US side taking clear ownership of the global platform and re-architecture.

How US and Tokyo work together

We say “one team,” and we mean it — but one team still needs clear decision rights. So they’re explicit:

• The US (you) owns the global platform and architecture: the multi-locale/multi-currency backbone, the global API and data model, and the re-architecture roadmap. On those, you hold the pen.
• Tokyo owns the existing Japan product and the system that serves it today, and is the deep source of truth on how the current product actually behaves with real users and real money.
• Per-market buildout is shared. You design the global backbone; market-specific buildout is divided with Tokyo case by case.
• The CEO breaks ties. I’m in Palo Alto, in the room with you, and when US and Tokyo genuinely disagree on direction, I decide quickly so nothing stalls across timezones.

You won’t be a US satellite asking Tokyo for permission, and you won’t be overriding the team that built the proven product. You own the global platform we’re building; Tokyo owns the proven Japan product and the system serving it today — one team, raising the bar together.

What you’ll own from day one

1. US/global platform architecture. Lead the technical design and implementation of the platform that powers mond outside Japan: multi-locale and multi-currency, global API and data-model design, reliability for viral traffic (regional traffic can jump an order of magnitude in hours), trust & safety as a core layer, and payments / points / monetization. You design the global backbone; per-market buildout is shared with Tokyo.

2. Re-architecture of a live product. mond is one live app today. Audit current and anticipated bottlenecks, decide what stays and what changes, build the migration path to the next-generation system, and make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and long-term architecture — shaped together with the CEO and Tokyo Tech Lead.

3. Creator monetization and payments correctness. Extend the production ledger into a cross-market system: dual-market Stripe platform accounts, Connect payouts, per-transaction double-entry records, multi-currency, and a points / virtual-currency economy. This is the economic layer of the creator platform.

4. Product surfaces, not just infrastructure. Build the product itself: creator inbox, question intake and answer flow, public answer pages, paid-answer mechanics, monetization flows, moderation surfaces, and early US growth loops. You make product calls without a PM or a perfect spec — the CEO will be in user interviews alongside you.

5. Trust & safety as product. mond only works if people can be candid without the product becoming toxic. Design the safety layer — moderation pipeline, AI-assisted tooling, creator controls, abuse prevention, reporting and escalation — that keeps candid, unattributed questions safe from harassment while preserving what makes them honest.

6. Minimum analytics foundation. Define the minimum measurement needed for fast iteration, then decide what to build directly, what to keep simple, and what to delegate to the appropriate Tokyo-side engineers. The priority is the end-user product and the global architecture.

Growth path

This role starts as Founding Engineer / Technical Lead, US, and can grow into CTO / Head of Engineering as the US team scales — earned through building: architecture quality, product judgment, recruiting pull, cross-region trust, and aligning people around the right technical direction.

Current stack

• Web: Next.js, TypeScript
• Mobile: React Native + Expo
• Backend: Node.js, Prisma
• API: Hasura GraphQL
• Database: Postgres on Cloud SQL
• Infrastructure: GCP, Terraform
• Repo: TypeScript monorepo

You’ll decide what stays, what changes, and what becomes the global platform.

Who we’re looking for

Three things are required. 

1. You’ve built or rebuilt something real — shipped 0→1 and reached PMF, or owned and re-architected a live production system, as a founder, founding engineer, technical lead, or the person who launched or rebuilt something real users and real money depended on.
2. You’re strong across product and engineering — you design systems, write code, make product calls, and ship without a perfect spec. Strong full-stack TypeScript (React, Next.js, Node, cloud) is a strong plus; close equivalents are welcome if the judgment is there.
3. You operate across regions in English — write clearly, speak directly, and build alignment across timezones.

Strong signals — one matters more than checking every box:

• You’ve built payment, ledger, marketplace, or virtual-currency systems — anything where correctness meant money
• You’ve built creator-economy, consumer-social, messaging, Q&A, community, or audience-engagement products
• You’ve re-architected a live production system while users kept using it
• You’ve used AI agents to move faster as an engineer, without outsourcing judgment to them
• You care about trust & safety as part of product design
• You want to eventually lead engineers, but you still want to build