Software Engineer
Arkzphere · New York, United States
Founding engineer Mobile / Full-stack · Seed-stage About Arkzphere Arkzphere is a presence-based social discovery app built around real-world connection — no likes, no follows, only here. Our core feature, Scenes, lets people join time-windowed social moments happening around them right now. We have 22K organic waitlist signups ahead of our launch in NYC, and we're raising a pre-seed round at a $6–8M cap. The role You'll be the first engineer hire and a true co-builder of Arkzphere alongside the founder. You'll own architecture decisions, ship features end-to-end, and help us scale from launch to tens of thousands of daily active users in NYC. This isn't a "write tickets and execute" role — you'll have real product input and real equity. What you'll work on ▸ Own and ship features across the React Native/Expo mobile app ▸ Scale and evolve our Firebase/Firestore + Express backend as user load grows ▸ Build and improve real-time features: live attendee feeds, push notifications, location-aware discovery ▸ Improve video/media upload pipelines (Cloudinary, Expo AV/Video) ▸ Set up and evolve CI/CD, monitoring, and dev tooling (EAS, Railway, Sentry) ▸ Contribute to architecture decisions: feed personalization, ML ranking, ticketing, monetization What we're looking for ▸ 3+ years shipping mobile or full-stack production apps (React Native a strrong plus) ▸ Comfortable with NoSQL / Firestore data modeling and real-time systems ▸ Strong product instincts — you care about the "why" behind what you build ▸ Thrives in zero-to-one, low-process environments where priorities shift fast ▸ Experience with geolocation features, media pipelines, or social apps is a bonus Nice to have ◦ Prior startup or founding engineer experience ◦ Familiarity with Redis pub/sub, SSE, or other real-time infrastructure patterns ◦ Interest in ML-based feed personalization or recommendation systems ◦ NYC-based or willing to relocate (launch city) What we offer Equity Meaningful founder-level Stage Pre-seed, actively raising Location NYC (in-person preferred) Impact Architect the whole product