Founding Engineer / Technical Lead, US — mond, Palo Alto

必須

• 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.
• 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.
• You operate across regions in English — write clearly, speak directly, and build alignment across timezones.

歓迎

• 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

求める人物像

• We want people who use AI to go faster on the things that are mechanical and stay slow and deliberate on the things that are load-bearing: architecture, correctness, money, trust.

応募について

• we’re open to sponsoring the right person.
• Candidates already authorized to work in the US (citizens or permanent residents) are simplest, but if you’d need sponsorship, tell us your situation and we’ll give you a straight answer fast.

使用ツール

The one-paragraph pitch

• Japan was the first market — the proof. The ambition is not “expand beyond Japan.” It’s to take a model that already works and build it for a global audience, from Palo Alto. This is not a localization role. The US team defines the global product and architecture, working with Tokyo as one team. You’ll own the technical design and implementation of the US/global platform, lead the re-architecture for multi-locale and multi-currency scale, and help launch mond in the US. As the US team scales, this role can grow into CTO / Head of Engineering.

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.