Founding Full-Stack Engineer

SocialDB is the open database and marketplace for the creator economy. We've built public listings for 1.4M+ creators across a dozen platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, X, podcasts and more — each with real, automatically-refreshed analytics, plus 24,000+ brands. On top of that data we run a two-sided marketplace: brands discover creators and book sponsorships and paid collabs, with funds held in Stripe-backed escrow until the work is delivered.

We're small, bootstrapped and fast. As a founding engineer you'll own entire product surfaces end-to-end, work directly with the founder, and see your code in front of real users the same week you write it.

What you'll do

• Ship features across the whole stack — search, listings, the deals & escrow flow, Stripe payments, and the dashboards creators and brands live in
• Turn a large, messy 1.4M-row dataset into fast, trustworthy product: smart indexes, caching, and queries that stay quick as it grows
• Take new marketplace surfaces from a one-line idea to shipped, instrumented and measured
• Use the data you capture to decide what to build next — you own outcomes, not tickets
• Keep the site fast and reliable on a lean budget; performance and cost are features
• Set the engineering conventions and quality bar for the team that comes after you

What success looks like

• Month 1: you've shipped visible improvements to a core flow and know the codebase cold
• Month 3: you own one or two whole surfaces (e.g. deals, or search) and drive their roadmap
• Month 6: you're a technical anchor the team builds around, and the product is measurably faster and easier to work in

What we're looking for

• 4+ years building and shipping web products real people use
• Strong across backend, database and frontend — comfortable owning a feature from schema to UI
• Genuine product instincts: you make good calls without a detailed spec
• You've shipped solo or in a tiny team and liked the ownership
• Pragmatic about tradeoffs — you know when to move fast and when to be careful (payments, data integrity)

Nice to have

• Payments, escrow or marketplace experience
• Data-pipeline or large-dataset work
• A background in, or real curiosity about, the creator economy
• Comfort with PHP/MySQL (our stack), or the ability to get productive in it quickly

Why join

• A true founding role: meaningful equity and a real say in the product and the company
• Total ownership — whole surfaces, not tickets — and a short path from idea to shipped
• Fully remote and async-friendly, on a small team that ships every day
• Work directly with the founder on a product with millions of data points and real revenue
• Competitive salary for an early-stage startup, plus equity

How to apply

Send your CV or LinkedIn along with a couple of links to things you've built or shipped — side projects absolutely count. A short note on the most impressive thing you've owned end-to-end goes a long way. We read and reply to every serious application.