Technical Co-Founder

Company Description Optimly is building Nielsen for AI — but the version that goes beyond measurement and actually improves your marketing effectiveness. When people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity what to buy or who to trust, brands are represented, ranked, and recommended inside a black box no marketing team can see into. We make it measurable — and then we give brands the tools to change the answer. We audit how AI describes a brand across all four models, capture the demand signals AI crawlers leave behind, and turn it into attribution (where AI recommends you, where it doesn't, what's driving it). Then we close the loop with the levers that actually move it: a verified source of truth AI resolves to, a weekly highest-priority fix, and the machine-readable surfaces models trust. That's the near-term product. The reason it's a company and not a feature: as AI becomes the layer people trust to make buying decisions, the winner is whoever can both measure it and help brands improve it. That's the bet, and there's a closing window to make it. Role Description We're looking for a true Technical Co-Founder and partner. You'll shape the company alongside the founder, own the technical vision, and build the product from the ground up. You'll bring deep AI expertise and a genuine pull toward the problem: making how AI represents brands both measurable and improvable. You'll work hand in hand with the founder as a thought partner, blending a sharp market view with cutting-edge AI to build a category-defining product. This goes far beyond writing code — you'll co-own product strategy, drive architecture, help set culture, and guide Optimly from where it is today to market leader. Room to experiment, break things, and rebuild fast. Responsibilities - Translate the founding vision into a working AI product — the engine that both measures how AI represents brands and helps them improve it. - Build and iterate quickly — experimenting, hacking, and shipping daily. - Lead AI-first development across multi-model evaluation, retrieval, agentic orchestration, and data automation. - Own the full loop: measurement and attribution on one side, the improvement tools (verified source of truth, weekly fixes, agent-readable surfaces) on the other. - Define and own the long-term technical roadmap, architecture, and infrastructure (GCP, Postgres, Cloudflare Workers at the edge, multi-LLM pipelines). - Collaborate as a true thought partner with the founder, merging market insight with technical innovation. - Engage directly with early customers to drive product-market fit and rapid iteration. - Help shape company culture and values as a co-founder. Qualifications — you might be a fit if you - See yourself as an AI-native engineer/CTO who lives in the modern toolchain (Cursor, Claude, Copilot). - Believe that this is category-defining problem: how AI represents, ranks, and recommends brands — and why measuring and improving that is something that is worth spending the next decade on. - Have taken products end-to-end, ideally at an early-stage startup. - Bring strong full-stack skills (databases, APIs, web architecture) and real AI/ML depth (LLM apps, evals, RAG, agentic systems, data automation). - Stay relentlessly curious about the latest tools, models, and research. - Love building and experimenting on your own as much as collaborating. - Are product-oriented — you turn vision into something users love. - Have scrappy 0→1 experience and are excited to build fast. Bonus if you have - Experience in marketing analytics, attribution, measurement, or mar-tech/ad-tech infrastructure. - Edge compute (Cloudflare Workers), MCP, or knowledge-graph experience. - Shopify ecosystem / e-commerce integration background. - Startup fundraising or investor-facing experience. What's In It For You - True co-founder equity — significant ownership, the defining part of this offer. - Co-create the measurement and effectiveness standard for how brands exist inside AI — at a minimum, this is a Nielsen-sized category, still in early innings. - Salary: $100K–$200K depending on experience, plus significant equity as a co-founder. - In-person in Seattle.