Founding Engineer

About SonicCritic

Streaming pays artists fractions of a penny. SonicCritic doesn’t. We’re a direct-to-fan music platform where independent artists keep 88% of net subscription revenue - real economics, not a rounding error. The MVP is live (web + iOS), we’re incorporated as a Delaware C-corp, and we’re raising a pre-seed round now. You’d be the first engineering hire, working directly with the founder.

The founder built the current product solo. He’s an independent artist who lived the problem - uncredited work, opaque splits, streaming payouts that don’t cover rent - and turned it into a platform. You’d be joining to help him scale it.

What you’ll do

• Own the codebase alongside the founder: architecture decisions, code quality, shipping velocity

• Build and harden core product surfaces - artist upload and payout flows, audio streaming and playback, subscription billing, discovery

• Take the iOS app (Capacitor) and web app from MVP to production-grade

• Design for scale on a lean infrastructure footprint (zero-egress storage architecture keeps our bandwidth costs at zero - help us keep it that way)

• Set the engineering culture: testing, CI/CD, on-call, documentation - you write the playbook

• Talk to artists and fans. Small team, no PM layer. You’ll see the impact of what you ship directly.

Our stack

React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind + shadcn/ui, TanStack Query on the front end. Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Edge Functions, Realtime, Storage) on the back end. Capacitor for iOS. Stripe for payments. Cloudflare R2 for audio storage. Spotify and Shazam API integrations.

You don’t need to know all of it. You need to be able to pick any of it up fast.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years shipping production software, with real full-stack range

• Experience at an early-stage startup - ideally you’ve been employee #1–5 somewhere and know what that actually means

• Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end without a spec

• Strong TypeScript/React; solid instincts with Postgres and serverless backends

• Bonus: production experience with audio streaming, media pipelines, or real-time systems

• Bonus: you’re a musician, or you care enough about music to be angry about how artists get paid

What you get

• Founding equity that reflects founding risk - standard 4-year vest, 1-year cliff

• Direct partnership with the founder/CEO; your fingerprints on every technical decision

• A live product with real users, not a slide deck

• A mission with teeth: every subscriber we add puts $10.84/month directly into artists’ pockets

How to apply

Email a short note about the most interesting thing you’ve shipped - plus a link to code, a product, or anything you’ve built. If you’ve ever released music, mention that too. andrew@soniccritic.ai