Founding Software Engineer

The Role

You'll be the founding engineer at Nero, working directly with the CTO to scale our platform and build features that don't exist yet.

We need someone who can own complex technical problems end-to-end—from database design to deployment pipelines to UI.

You'll have significant autonomy to identify opportunities, solve problems, and ship code that directly impacts 100k+ artists and fans per month. Over time, you'll shape both the technical architecture and what we actually build.

What you'll work on:

• Building new features from scratch (fan CRM systems, peer-to-peer payments, automated clipping engines). You'll ship complete products.
• You'll own infrastructure and reliability as we scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. This means implementing CI/CD, monitoring, and deployment systems that let us move fast without breaking things.
• You'll architect real-time systems - websockets for live queues, payment processing for fan submissions … aka infrastructure I think is interesting to build (and you should too!)

Who You Are

Must-haves:

• 1+ years of professional experience (open to new grads with strong internship experience)
• Experience with TypeScript, React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL
• You're fluent in Claude Code/Cursor/Windsurf
• Opinionated on visual and technical design
• You know what looks good and can implement it
• You own problems and execute quickly (without hand-holding)
• Willing to work 50+ hour weeks

Nice-to-haves:

• Built products from 0 → 1 with real users and revenue
• Side projects that show you building in public
• You go to hackathons
• Experience with DevOps, monitoring, or distributed systems a plus
• Interest in music, creator economy, or livestreaming

Personality-wise:

• You love music and want to help artists and creators
• You're down for adventure. We've worked from Mexico for a month, traveled to music conferences around the US, stuff like that.

Note: Please consider applying even if you don't meet these qualifications. Ultimately, we are just looking for someone who is smart, can learn quickly, and can own problems and execute on solutions!

About Nero

Nero is building the monetization rails for interactive livestreaming. We're infrastructure that works alongside existing platforms like Twitch, Instagram and TikTok to let creators monetize their audiences. We're starting with music, but the model extends to gaming, sports, chess, and any vertical where fans pay for direct creator engagement. Watch one of our artists, Sonny Digital, explaining it:

And if you couldn't tell already, we aren't another enterprise SaaS company or an AI wrapper startup. We're literally reshaping the way artists earn money through livestreams. Creators have earned over $1.5M reviewing fan-submitted songs and we've raised capital from Yamaha Music Innovation Fund, Antler, and various angels from the music industry.

Interview Process

1. 30-minute phone screen
2. 1-hour technical interview OR 2-3 hour Takehome
3. 1 hour review and conversation with Eddie (CEO)

Compensation & Logistics

• $140k-$180k based on experience
• :0.25%-1.0%
• San Francisco, hybrid
• Start Date: ASAP