Founding CTO (Co-founder Earn-in)

About

Game Caster is the living marketing plan that turns the act of making a game into the act of marketing it.

We're building the modern marketing operating system for game studios — the studios most likely to put a heart-and-soul project on Steam and struggle to get their voices heard in a crowded market. Our pitch: Built with genre and sub-genre level specificity, we build a marketing plan that turns your game development journey into regular marketing content.

We just finished a beta with 20 studios. We have a paying lighthouse customer running the full Plan → Style → Feed loop end-to-end on an open world/survival/crafting title. The product works. The next chapter is taking it from 20 studios to hundreds — and the engineering side of that chapter is yours to own.

The role

This is a full-time remote (UK preferred but open to all locations) role for a Founding CTO on a co-founder earn-in track. As the Founding CTO, you will lead the end-to-end software development process, define technical architecture, and oversee IT strategy. By Year 1 you've inherited a working V2, hardened it for scale, hired the team, and earned your way to Co-founder & CTO alongside your final equity grant.

This is an opportunity if you are passionate about gaming & tech and want to start a movement that will create a good change in how games are marketed and get discovered.

Year 1 outcomes

• Day 90: own deploys, on-call, Stripe billing, PostHog A/B experiments
• Month 8: mature Style Lock (reference → fine-tuning), evolve The Feed (V0 → proactive), first engineering hire
• Month 12: 2–3 person team, 10x load handled, Co-founder & CTO title + final equity grant

Must-haves

• 6+ years production backend (TypeScript/Node.js or Python; V2 is TS)
• Production experience on both AWS and GCP — non-negotiable
• React + Next.js comfortable
• LLM APIs in production (multimodal prompting, retry strategy, cost discipline)
• Stripe + PostHog hands-on (freemium gate tuning is the daily job)
• Active gamer OR shipped at a games company. Hard requirement.
• Startup resilience: ambiguity, fast iteration, transparent comms

Strong bonus

• Diffusion / LoRA / image-gen training experience (part of Style evolution roadmap)
• Production A/B testing — variant power, decision rules, learning velocity
• FFmpeg / video-processing in production
• Prior 0→1 startup experience

Hard pass if

• "I'd rewrite everything in [X]" — V2 is live with a paying customer
• You are not interested in games and have never worked in games
• You want 5 engineers before seeing the codebase
• You optimise for cash over upside

Apply

Email [email protected] with: a short note on your experience in Gaming and AI + links to shipped work + why you want to join