Founding Software Engineer

About Nero

Nero is building the monetization rails for interactive livestreaming. We're infrastructure that works alongside existing platforms like Twitch, Instagram and TikTok to let creators monetize their audiences. We're starting with music, but the model extends to gaming, sports, chess, and any vertical where fans pay for direct creator engagement. Watch one of our artists, Sonny Digital, explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrZXXdcjsWo&t=3946s.

And if you couldn’t tell already, we are NOT another enterprise SaaS company or an AI wrapper startup. We’re reshaping the way artists earn money through livestreams. Creators have earned over $2M reviewing fan-submitted songs and we've raised $1.5M from Yamaha Music Innovation Fund, Antler, and various angels from the music industry.

The Role

You’ll be the founding engineer at Nero, working directly with the CTO (Gabe) to scale our platform and build features that don't exist yet. We need someone who can own complex technical problems end-to-end—from database design to deployment pipelines to UI. You'll have significant autonomy to identify opportunities, solve problems, and ship code that directly impacts 500k+ artists and fans per month. Over time, you’ll shape both the technical architecture and what we actually build.

What You'll Work On

Building new features from scratch (fan CRM systems, peer-to-peer payments, automated clipping engines). You’ll ship complete products.
You’ll own infrastructure and reliability as we scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. This means implementing CI/CD, monitoring, and deployment systems that let us move fast without breaking things.
You’ll architect real-time systems - websockets for live queues, payment processing for fan submissions … aka infrastructure I think is interesting to build (and you should too!)

Must-haves

1+ years of professional experience (open to new grads with strong internship experience)
Experience with TypeScript, React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL
You're fluent in Claude Code/Cursor/Windsurf
Opinionated on visual and technical design
You know what looks good and can implement it
You own problems and execute without hand-holding and quickly
Willing to work 50+ hour weeks

Nice-to-haves

Built products from 0 → 1 with real users and revenue
Side projects that show you building in public
You go to hackathons
Experience with DevOps, monitoring, or distributed systems a plus

Culture-fit:

You love music and want to help artists and creators
You're down for adventure. We've worked from Mexico for a month, traveled to music conferences around the US, stuff like that.