Founding Engineer

Be the first full-time engineer and technical owner of Thicket — a marketplace for live, small-group online seminars in the humanities, where experts teach what they want, and adults take classes for the love of it.

The product is built and running: a Rails 8 + React app (Inertia, Postgres) that handles marketplace payments, scheduling, video, and real-time discussion. You'd take it over and run it. For now, you're the whole engineering team, so you'll write most of the code yourself — and the team that built it stays on to hand it over properly and back you up after, so you're not starting cold.

Who you'll work with

Nick Constantino, our founder — he co-founded Sticker Mule and holds a History PhD from UC Berkeley. He owns the product; you own the technology.

What you'll own

Marketplace payments and teacher payouts (Stripe Connect).
Real-time class discussion and notifications.
Third-party integrations — video and calendar.
The React / Inertia / TypeScript front end.
The Rails backend end to end: data model, background jobs, the lot.

You're a fit if

You've run a production Rails app end to end — ideally one that handled money or worked in real time.
You're genuinely full-stack: Rails and React, no handoff.
You can keep a solo-owned codebase boring and maintainable.
You can overlap ~4h with US hours and write well in English.

Nice to have

You've been the only engineer before — with a non-technical founder.
Product instinct: opinions about the UX, not just the schema.

The deal

Start with part-time and then potentially switch to full-time, fully remote.

Compensation: $145,000–$185,000

About Thicket