Founding Engineer - SonicCritic

Location: Remote (company based in New Orleans, LA) Compensation: Equity only (1–3%, four-year vesting with one-year cliff) Stage: Pre-seed, bootstrapped, pre-incorporation (Delaware C-corp formation in progress)

SonicCritic is a music streaming platform built on a simple bet: the current platforms have burned artists badly enough that a genuinely artist-first alternative can win. Artists on SonicCritic keep 88% of revenue net of payment processing, retain full ownership of their masters, and get discovered through community-driven curation instead of an engagement-optimized algorithm. No listener data harvesting. Bandcamp's acquisitions eroded the trust of exactly the artists and fans we're building for, and we're moving while that window is open. The MVP exists. I need a second engineer to help me turn it into a platform.

What you'd own

You'd be engineer #2 (I'm engineer #1 and the founder), which means real ownership, not tickets:

• Streaming infrastructure - audio delivery, transcoding, CDN strategy, and the performance work that makes playback feel instant
• Payments and payouts - the artist revenue pipeline is the product; you'd help build the system that gets artists their 88% accurately and on time
• Core platform - upload flows, artist profiles, community/discovery features, and the privacy-by-design architecture that means we never have listener data to leak
• Technical decisions that stick - stack choices, architecture, and infrastructure made now will define the company for years; you'd be in the room for all of them

Who this fits

• A full-stack engineer with 3+ years shipping production systems, comfortable owning features end to end without a spec
• Experience with audio/streaming, payments, or high-throughput media delivery is a strong plus, not a requirement
• You have runway - a day job, contract income, or savings - because this is equity-only until we raise. I won't pretend otherwise.
• You care that musicians get paid. If the mission doesn't land for you, the equity math won't either.

What you should know going in

I'm not going to sell you a fantasy. Here's the honest picture:

• We're pre-revenue and bootstrapped. Compensation is equity, granted as restricted stock at incorporation, with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff. The offer letter is contingent on entity formation, which is underway.
• I built the current MVP myself. It works; it needs hardening, and you'd have a real hand in deciding what it becomes.
• We're preparing to fundraise. A strong founding engineer materially improves those odds - that's part of why this role exists, and your equity is how you share in the upside if it works.
• The roadmap runs on decision gates, not vibes. There's a written 24-month plan with milestones through a Series A decision point.

How to apply

Email a short note about the most technically interesting thing you've shipped and why, plus a link to code or a live product.

Contact: andrew@soniccritic.ai