Technical Co-founder

About Tocayo

Tocayo helps local business owners create and manage their online presence without becoming website designers.

A business owner answers a few questions and Tocayo generates a complete, hosted website. They can refine it conversationally, publish it, connect a domain, receive customer inquiries, manage bookings, and understand how their site is performing.

This is not an idea-stage project or an unfinished prototype. Tocayo is live, has generated more than 130 business websites, and supports free and paid customers. You can see the product and customer examples at tocayo.me.

The hard truth is that we have not yet established repeatable product-market fit. The technology is substantial; distribution, conversion, retention, and ruthless product focus are the next problems to solve. We are looking for a technical cofounder who wants ownership of that entire outcome—not someone who only wants to complete tickets.

The opportunity

Tocayo was built by a solo technical founder and has reached the point where one person should no longer be the sole owner of engineering, product execution, and production operations.

You will join as a genuine cofounder with meaningful ownership and decision-making authority. You will inherit a broad working system, determine which parts deserve continued investment, simplify what has become too complex, and help turn a capable product into a focused company.

This is a hands-on role. You will write and review production code, make architectural decisions, investigate customer problems, improve reliability, shape the roadmap, and help decide what the company should—and should not—build.

What you will own

• Share company-level technical and product decisions with the founder.
• Take end-to-end ownership of critical customer journeys, from onboarding through website generation, editing, publishing, lead capture, booking, billing, and ongoing management.
• Improve the reliability, security, observability, and maintainability of a production system with real users.
• Simplify architecture and remove accidental complexity rather than automatically adding more software.
• Turn customer behavior and product analytics into a sharply prioritized engineering roadmap.
• Improve conversion, activation, retention, and the speed at which Tocayo can test product hypotheses.
• Establish pragmatic engineering practices appropriate for a small, resource-constrained company.
• Make thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions across AI models, infrastructure, communications, payments, and other external services.
• Help recruit and lead the first engineering hires when the company can support them.
• Participate in customer conversations, fundraising, strategic planning, and company formation decisions where appropriate.
• Share responsibility for production incidents and for creating systems that reduce their frequency and impact.

The system you will work on

Tocayo is a full-stack product rather than a thin interface over a language model. Its major engineering surfaces include:

• A Python backend built around FastAPI, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and asynchronous workers.
• A Next.js, React, and TypeScript web application.
• An Expo and React Native mobile application.
• AI-assisted website generation and conversational editing workflows.
• Website rebuilding from an existing business website.
• Hosted-site build, publishing, domain, and edge-delivery systems.
• Voice and messaging experiences.
• Payments, subscriptions, booking integrations, lead capture, analytics, and SEO tooling.
• Production monitoring, background processing, third-party integrations, and operational automation.

You do not need prior experience with every technology in the stack. You must be capable of learning unfamiliar systems quickly and making sound decisions across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and AI boundaries.

What we are looking for

You are likely a strong fit if you:

• Have repeatedly shipped and operated substantial customer-facing software.
• Can work productively across backend and frontend systems rather than treating “full stack” as a collection of framework keywords.
• Are highly capable in at least one of Python or TypeScript and comfortable becoming effective in the other.
• Understand API design, data modeling, asynchronous processing, production debugging, testing, and cloud infrastructure.
• Know how to make AI-backed features reliable through structured outputs, validation, evaluation, fallbacks, and observability—not prompt experimentation alone.
• Can distinguish necessary architecture from architecture theater.
• Are willing to delete, consolidate, or defer systems when that produces a better company.
• Use customer evidence and measurable outcomes to challenge founder assumptions.
• Communicate directly, document important decisions, and surface bad news early.
• Can operate without a product manager, engineering manager, QA department, or platform team.
• Want the responsibility and ambiguity of founding a company, not merely the title.
• Care about helping small businesses succeed and are willing to speak directly with the people using the product.

Strong candidates will often have seven or more years of relevant experience, but demonstrated scope, judgment, and shipped work matter more than a particular number of years.

Particularly relevant experience

Any of the following would be valuable but is not required:

• Early-stage startup or zero-to-one product experience.
• Generative AI products, evaluation systems, or agentic workflows.
• Website builders, content-management systems, visual editors, or code-generation systems.
• Real-time audio, voice agents, telephony, or WebSocket systems.
• Payments, subscriptions, communications, or calendar integrations.
• Cloudflare, managed cloud infrastructure, edge delivery, or multi-tenant SaaS.
• React Native or mobile product development.
• Developer tooling, reliability engineering, application security, or production operations.
• Working directly with nontechnical small-business customers.

What the first six months should accomplish

Together, we expect to:

1. Develop a shared understanding of the product, customers, architecture, economics, and current failure modes.
2. Identify the few customer journeys that matter most and make them measurably more reliable and effective.
3. Simplify the engineering system where breadth or complexity is slowing execution.
4. Establish a disciplined product-learning loop connecting customer conversations, analytics, experiments, and engineering priorities.
5. Improve activation, conversion, retention, or another mutually selected company-level metric—not merely ship a larger feature count.
6. Define the technical and organizational plan required to reach sustainable revenue or an investable financing milestone.

Cofounder terms

This position offers 20% founder equity and currently offers no cash salary.

The final grant will be documented through definitive company agreements, including the capitalization basis, vesting, intellectual-property assignment, governance rights, and treatment of future financing. The expected structure is long-term founder vesting, with the precise commencement date and cliff agreed before work begins.

There is no guaranteed date on which salary will begin. Adding founder salaries will depend on revenue, financing, runway, and mutual approval. Any candidate should assume that the equity is illiquid, may be diluted by future financing, and may ultimately be worth nothing.

This is not an attempt to replace a salaried engineer with inexpensive labor. The ownership is substantial because the risk, responsibility, and authority are substantial.

This is probably not for you if

• You require cash compensation immediately.
• You want a conventional employee relationship with a predefined backlog.
• You are looking for a short-term freelance engagement.
• You prefer managing engineers to writing and operating software.
• You only want to work on frontend, backend, AI, or infrastructure in isolation.
• You measure progress primarily by code volume or number of features shipped.
• You expect an idea-stage greenfield codebase.
• You are uncomfortable challenging the founder or being challenged with evidence.
• You cannot make a serious path toward full-time commitment.

How to apply

Please include:

• A brief explanation of why a technical cofounder role makes sense for you now.
• One product or system you personally took from ambiguity to production.
• An example of a technically impressive idea you chose not to build—or later simplified—and why.
• Links to relevant products, code, writing, or technical work.
• Your current location, availability, and expected path to full-time commitment.
• The questions you would need answered before accepting 20% equity with no current salary.

Please do not send a generic cover letter. We are more interested in how you think, what you have actually owned, and what evidence would cause you to change direction.