S
Founding Engineer
Accepting applicationsSparqList · New York, NY
Full-Time Entry aiaterf
Posted
7 May
Category
Test
Experience
Entry
Country
United States
NYC · Hybrid · Full-Time · Founding Equity
About SparqList
SparqList is a three-sided local-discovery marketplace where small businesses, vetted creators, and everyday locals meet inside one product. Vendors post deals, happy hours, events, and reservation-style collab offers; creators book those collabs and earn tier-weighted attribution on every customer they bring in; locals discover venues through people they trust, redeem deals in real time by location, and climb a lifetime tier ladder with loyalty rewards that travel across the platform. Launching in New York first.
The Role
You'd be employee #1, working directly with the founder on every layer of the product. The platform is already real: 188 migrations, 26 edge functions, mobile + admin web, atomic billing rails, RLS-locked data model, push notifications, Realtime subscriptions, and a 5-tier creator + 4-tier consumer economy already shipping. We're past the prototype stage. What we need now is someone who can take ownership of the engineering surface area as we ramp into NYC launch.
What You'll Actually Do
Ship features end-to-end across the mobile app (Expo / React Native), admin web (Vite + React), and Supabase backend (Postgres, Edge Functions, Realtime).
Write SQL migrations with RLS policies, SECURITY DEFINER RPCs, and triggers. Money flows through atomic transactions and we're cents-everywhere on every column.
Own the redemption / attribution / billing pipeline. Real money moves through these rails; correctness is non-negotiable.
Build new vendor + creator surfaces: customer CRM, content moderation, payouts, calendar sync, analytics.
Debug everything from push notification delivery to multi-business RLS edge cases to iOS image-picker quirks.
Pair with me on product decisions. Every engineering choice has a marketplace consequence.
Required Experience
4+ years shipping production software, some of it at a startup or product team (not all consultancy).
Strong with TypeScript in strict mode. We don't ship any.
Deep React Native (Expo SDK 54, RN 0.81+). Comfortable with EAS builds, native modules, push notifications, deep links.
Comfortable writing PostgreSQL at the SQL level: migrations, indexes, RLS policies, triggers, SECURITY DEFINER functions. You shouldn't need an ORM to feel productive.
Production Supabase (or equivalent: Firebase, Hasura, Postgres + REST) experience.
React + Vite (or any modern React) for the admin web.
Comfort with edge functions / serverless TypeScript (Deno or Node).
Clean commit hygiene, opinionated about code review.
Nice to Have
Built or worked on a marketplace product (multi-sided economics, attribution, payouts).
Experience with Stripe Connect or comparable payment splits.
Native iOS / Android background (helpful when Expo abstractions break).
Sentry / observability tooling familiarity.
DBA-level Postgres comfort (lock contention, query plans, index tuning).
Who You Are
You ship. Not just code, features that ship to real users with real money on the line.
You debug at the system level. When an offer disappears, you can trace it from the React component through the Zustand store through the Supabase REST call through the RLS policy through the trigger fan-out, and ship a fix before lunch.
You read existing code before suggesting a rewrite.
You're comfortable being the only person who knows something. We have docs, but we don't have specialists yet.
You're excited about NYC small businesses and the creator economy. You don't have to be a creator yourself, but you should care about the people we're building for.
What You'll Get
Founding-engineer equity (meaningful, vested over four years).
Market-rate cash salary. We won't lowball just because we're early. We are close to being fully funded.
A real product to ship into a real market with real users in week one, not a year of zero-to-one greenfield.
Direct work with the founder. No layers, no PMs translating requirements.
Architecture authority. You decide engineering calls in your domain.
A seat at the table on every product, hiring, and fundraising conversation as we scale.
How to Apply
DM me on LinkedIn or email dev@sparqlist.com with:
A short note on why this, the marketplace problem, the stack, NYC, whatever lands for you.
Three things you've shipped. Not where you've worked, what you've actually built and what was hard about it.
GitHub or portfolio if you have one.
Show more Show less
About SparqList
SparqList is a three-sided local-discovery marketplace where small businesses, vetted creators, and everyday locals meet inside one product. Vendors post deals, happy hours, events, and reservation-style collab offers; creators book those collabs and earn tier-weighted attribution on every customer they bring in; locals discover venues through people they trust, redeem deals in real time by location, and climb a lifetime tier ladder with loyalty rewards that travel across the platform. Launching in New York first.
The Role
You'd be employee #1, working directly with the founder on every layer of the product. The platform is already real: 188 migrations, 26 edge functions, mobile + admin web, atomic billing rails, RLS-locked data model, push notifications, Realtime subscriptions, and a 5-tier creator + 4-tier consumer economy already shipping. We're past the prototype stage. What we need now is someone who can take ownership of the engineering surface area as we ramp into NYC launch.
What You'll Actually Do
Ship features end-to-end across the mobile app (Expo / React Native), admin web (Vite + React), and Supabase backend (Postgres, Edge Functions, Realtime).
Write SQL migrations with RLS policies, SECURITY DEFINER RPCs, and triggers. Money flows through atomic transactions and we're cents-everywhere on every column.
Own the redemption / attribution / billing pipeline. Real money moves through these rails; correctness is non-negotiable.
Build new vendor + creator surfaces: customer CRM, content moderation, payouts, calendar sync, analytics.
Debug everything from push notification delivery to multi-business RLS edge cases to iOS image-picker quirks.
Pair with me on product decisions. Every engineering choice has a marketplace consequence.
Required Experience
4+ years shipping production software, some of it at a startup or product team (not all consultancy).
Strong with TypeScript in strict mode. We don't ship any.
Deep React Native (Expo SDK 54, RN 0.81+). Comfortable with EAS builds, native modules, push notifications, deep links.
Comfortable writing PostgreSQL at the SQL level: migrations, indexes, RLS policies, triggers, SECURITY DEFINER functions. You shouldn't need an ORM to feel productive.
Production Supabase (or equivalent: Firebase, Hasura, Postgres + REST) experience.
React + Vite (or any modern React) for the admin web.
Comfort with edge functions / serverless TypeScript (Deno or Node).
Clean commit hygiene, opinionated about code review.
Nice to Have
Built or worked on a marketplace product (multi-sided economics, attribution, payouts).
Experience with Stripe Connect or comparable payment splits.
Native iOS / Android background (helpful when Expo abstractions break).
Sentry / observability tooling familiarity.
DBA-level Postgres comfort (lock contention, query plans, index tuning).
Who You Are
You ship. Not just code, features that ship to real users with real money on the line.
You debug at the system level. When an offer disappears, you can trace it from the React component through the Zustand store through the Supabase REST call through the RLS policy through the trigger fan-out, and ship a fix before lunch.
You read existing code before suggesting a rewrite.
You're comfortable being the only person who knows something. We have docs, but we don't have specialists yet.
You're excited about NYC small businesses and the creator economy. You don't have to be a creator yourself, but you should care about the people we're building for.
What You'll Get
Founding-engineer equity (meaningful, vested over four years).
Market-rate cash salary. We won't lowball just because we're early. We are close to being fully funded.
A real product to ship into a real market with real users in week one, not a year of zero-to-one greenfield.
Direct work with the founder. No layers, no PMs translating requirements.
Architecture authority. You decide engineering calls in your domain.
A seat at the table on every product, hiring, and fundraising conversation as we scale.
How to Apply
DM me on LinkedIn or email dev@sparqlist.com with:
A short note on why this, the marketplace problem, the stack, NYC, whatever lands for you.
Three things you've shipped. Not where you've worked, what you've actually built and what was hard about it.
GitHub or portfolio if you have one.
Show more Show less