Founding Engineer / Technical Architect

Founding Engineer / Technical Architect

The Tour Card — the financial operating system for touring artists

About The Tour Card

Touring is a multi-million-dollar business run on spreadsheets, separate card logins, cash envelopes, and a 24-hour lag before anyone knows what was spent. Tour managers, business managers, and tour accountants stitch together credit cards, bank payments, sales reports, international disbursements, accounting tools, folders of receipts, and manual due-date grids to move money across legs, currencies, crew, and vendors, and still can't answer "where does the tour stand right now" on demand.

We're building the single operating system for touring artists’ money end to end: business charge cards with controls that don't strand people on the road, multi-currency spend and collection, per diems, automated receipt capture, real-time reconciliation into the books, float and settlement. We are imminently closing a seven figure pre-seed round, lining up design partners, and bringing on founding team members to start building the financial OS for touring artists.

Why this role, and why now

This is the first engineering hire and the person who owns the architecture. You won't start from scratch: we're inheriting a full-stack codebase from a consumer credit card product built with a leading issuing platform, including a working rewards system, an internal ledger, an admin portal, a responsive consumer web app, and the surrounding application architecture. Your first job is to take that stack in hand, decide what carries forward, and repurpose it from a consumer card into a B2B platform for touring money operations.
That makes this a rare founding seat: the stack exists and hard decisions have already been made, but it's inherited code written for a different product and a different user, so you need the judgment to know what to keep, what to rebuild, and what to throw away — and the range to then drive the whole product forward as the technical lead.

What you'll do

Own the architecture. Take over the inherited card issuing stack, assess it honestly, and set the technical direction for the pivot to a B2B, multi-tenant, multi-currency financial platform.
Ship the MVP. Get a real product into the hands of tour managers and tour accountants fast - card issuing with spend controls, virtual cards, a multi-account/multi-card single view, receipt capture, and accounting integration (Xero and similar).
Repurpose, don't rebuild for its own sake. Decide what the existing ledger, admin portal, rewards system, and web app give us, and adapt them to the touring use case rather than starting over where you don't have to.

Handle the hard fintech surfaces as they come up: ledger reconciliation, KYC/KYB, card controls, and eventually FX/multi-currency and float/credit.
Set the engineering foundations: codebase health, testing, security, deployment, AI guardrails. Build the framework that a small team can grow on.
Work directly with the founding team on product and priorities. At pre-seed, you're close to every decision, and you'll help shape what we build next and who we hire.

What you'll be working with

The inherited stack you'll take over and evolve:
An issuing platform integration for card and program management on top of a sponsor bank’s BIN
An internal ledger and rewards system
A React-based admin portal and a consumer web app
The application architecture around all of the above
AWS
React with Tailwind CSS
NestJS with Express
PostgreSQL
GraphQL partner API integration

Expect to extend this toward integrations the touring workflow demands like accounting systems, multi-currency accounts (collect/hold/spend), receipt and settlement data, and payments beyond cards (ACH/wire).

Who you are

A senior/staff/architect-level engineer who has owned a system end to end and shipped it. You’re comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room and making the call, and still have the chops and appetite to get into the code yourself.
Strong full-stack range. You can move across backend services, data/ledger models, and a web frontend without waiting for someone else to cover a layer.
You have a strong CI/CD process that has worked well in the past, and can scale up to our needs.
Good at inheriting and assessing someone else's codebase. Reading unfamiliar code, forming a clear view of what's worth keeping, and repurposing it without endless rewrites.
Pragmatic about velocity at pre-seed. You know when to build for correctness and when to ship and iterate, and you're energized rather than daunted by an ambiguous, fast-moving early stage.
Care about correctness where money is involved. You treat ledgers, balances, and reconciliation as things that have to be right, not roughly right.
AI-informed. You know where to use AI to accelerate timelines, where and how it falls apart, and how to build systems to keep it in check.

Strongly preferred

We'll weigh fintech and payments experience heavily. The strongest candidates bring hands-on work with some of:
Card issuing platforms - Highnote, Marqeta, Lithic, Stripe Issuing, Synctera, i2c, or similar.
Ledgers and double-entry accounting systems, and the discipline of keeping them reconciled.
KYC/KYB, card program controls, or banking/payments integrations (ACH, wire, accounting platforms like Xero/QuickBooks).
Multi-currency / FX money movement.

Experience being an early or founding engineer at a startup.

Nice to have

Comfort hiring and leading a small team as we grow past the first hires.
Any connection to live music, touring, wealth management, or the artist economy.

Logistics & compensation

Location: Remote, NYC-area preferred
Compensation: $180,000 – $225,000 plus equity.
Reports to: CEO