‍The role

Founding Lead Engineer at CrowdCut. This can be a path to CTO for the right candidate who takes comprehensive ownership of the technology stack.

You will own the architecture, the codebase, the technical hires, and the technical direction of the company. You will write code every day. You will work side-by-side with Ed on the product. You will recruit the engineers who come after you.

We need the standard bearer for engineering — the person who, when no one else knows what to do, decides; who cares about the craft on a daily basis; and who will do better work because they’re surrounded by the team CrowdCut has the chance to build.

What you’ll do

• Recruit and lead the engineering team, including the Founding AI Engineer.

• Take the MVP from “it works” to the version of CrowdCut people tell their friends about.

• Own the architecture and codebase end-to-end. Make the trade-offs that get us to market faster without painting us into corners.

• Build the media pipeline that turns multi-angle crowd-uploaded footage into auto-edited highlight reels.

• Ship CrowdCut into all the event categories — life moments, music and sports.

• Be a real partner to the founders on product direction. Your technical opinions should shape what we build, not just how it’s built. A big part of your role is building a product aligned with our strategy.

What we’re looking for

What you believe matters more than what’s on your résumé. We’re looking for:

• You love the craft of building. The reason you’d join a startup is to do more of it, with fewer obstacles in the way.

• You care about consumer products. You believe a product can be a beautiful thing, and a poorly-made one is a missed chance to do something great.

• You want to make a dent in the universe and work on something that matters. CrowdCut, in the end, is a product about how people, families and communities remember themselves. This work has meaning to you.

• You can take comprehensive ownership of a technology stack and the team that grows around it.

• You operate AI-natively. Coding agents do work for you while you’re AFK. You ship to production multiple times a week. Evals and observability are non-negotiable infrastructure, not afterthoughts.

• You are passionate about live events: sports, music, life moments that bring people together.

• You can recruit. The next engineers we hire will join because of you as much as because of us.

Experience we expect:

• Staff+ engineer or equivalent experience (roughly 10+ years in industry).

• You still write code regularly. This is a builder role.

• You have product taste. Most of your work will be under the hood, but you care how it lands.

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to be. This role is in-person.

Bonus points:

• Experience building photo and video editing and sharing tools — CapCut, Adobe Premiere Mobile, iMovie, VSCO, Splice, Meta Edits, or the equivalent creation teams inside larger consumer companies (TikTok creation, Instagram Reels editing, Snap camera, YouTube Shorts, Apple Memories, Google Photos).

• Audio matters in this product as much as video. Familiarity with audio-first products (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Shazam, or similar) is a strong plus.

• CrowdCut lives or dies on whether people share what they make. If you’ve worked on the creation or distribution surfaces of TikTok, Snap, or Instagram, you’ve built intuitions for what makes content travel through groups — and we’d weight that heavily.

What we offer

• Founder-level equity and market cash compensation. We will commit to a comp package that reflects how seriously we take this hire.

• The chance to define the technical character of a consumer company from the start.

• Two founders with deep consumer product backgrounds and a network across tech platforms, music, sports, and live events.

• A real product, real users, and real momentum.

How to apply

Email hello@crowdcut.ai. Tell us what you’re working on now and what would make you leave it.