Chief Technology Officer

Crowdsurf · Remote, US · $175,000 to $225,000 plus significant equity

Crowdsurf is an investment platform built as a live media experience. Viewers watch founders pitch on a nationally televised show, similar to Shark Tank, and can invest alongside the lead investor in each company. We are currently signing one of the top executive producers in the world, whose shows have consistently averaged over 2 million viewers per episode.

You own everything technical. Architecture, infrastructure, security, the vendor relationships, the code itself, and hiring the engineers we add along the way.

You'd work directly with our CEO, who manages multiple alternative investment funds, and our COO, who ran product and operations for a consumer platform doing over a billion dollars a year where the entire business was built on timed drops.

The hard part of this role is the traffic. We know roughly when millions of visits and tens of thousands of first-time investors will arrive. Each of those people is pushing real money through identity verification, an investment-limit check, an escrow API, and a payment rail. Several of those belong to third parties whose rate limits we don't set and can't raise.

What we have today was built to run a raise well, and it does that. It was not built for a wave. Turning one into the other before we ship in Q2, while building the live product on top of it, is the job.

You'll be in the code yourself, getting your hands dirty, making early build decisions that last before hiring a team to help us scale.

• Technology strategy. What we build, what we buy, what we kill, and in what order. The platform runs today, so much of the early work is deciding what survives contact with real volume.
• The engineering team. You hire it and you're accountable for what ships.
• The live product, which doesn't exist yet in full. The show, the app and the site have to feel like one experience while a raise is open. Live progress and social mechanics that hold up when tens of thousands of people watch the same number move at once.
• Surviving the drop. One durable, idempotent intake, so that "investor pressed the button" is separate from everything after it. Every synchronous external call mapped and rate-limited, with a defined failure behavior. Load tested against a burst rather than a ramp.
• Compliance and security, and the vendors underneath both. Investment limits, disclosure delivery, communication channels, records retention, ownership records that stay correct for years.
• Executive Leadership. You're in the room on roadmap and budget and on how fast we can really move, helping with key strategy decision.

Background

• Eight or more years building software, most of it at a senior level.
• You've run an engineering function. CTO or Head of Engineering is the shape we have in mind. A senior engineering manager works if the product was big enough that you carried real scale.
• You've shipped a production system that moved other people's money under a regulator. Broker-dealer, funding portal, payments, lending, transfer agent, it doesn't matter which. You can tell us how reconciliation worked and where it was thin.
• You've built for a burst you couldn't reschedule. A product drop, a ticket onsale, a broadcast, a Super Bowl ad. You know what fell over and why.
• You've taken something that worked at a small scale and made it survive a step change in volume without stopping the world to rewrite it.
• You can work through a rule with securities counsel and come out of the room with a schema.

How you work

• 10x engineer. Your raw ability is why people follow you. AI has made that count for more.
• Ship first, harden after. Get the product in front of people, find out whether it was worth building, then make it durable.
• System design. You've architected data-heavy applications end to end and you know which tradeoffs to make when.
• Security and compliance. You've built under an external standard and folded it in as you went.
• AI-native, with judgment. Agentic coding and testing tools are core to how you ship, and you'd own getting the whole function working that way. We're still hiring you for the decisions.

Reg CF, Reg A+, or Reg D platform experience. Form C, escrow agents, transfer agents. Consumer or media products with a live component.

$175,000 to $225,000 base, plus equity in Crowdsurf Markets, Inc. on a four-year vest with a one-year cliff. Remote anywhere in the US, with travel a handful of times a year.