Head of Engineering

Company Description Clockout is the fastest growing networking platform focused on IRL connection. We have crossed 500,000 downloads and $1M+ in annual recurring revenue within 10 months while still operating as a lean pre-seed beta. We recently closed our seed and are entering the next stage of growth: scaling the product, deepening personalization, and turning Clockout into the default network for ambitious young professionals. We are looking for a true 0→1 / 1→10 builder: someone who has either been a founding engineer, CTO, technical founder, or early technical leader at a consumer mobile, social, marketplace, community, or networking product that reached millions of active users. This is not a purely managerial CTO role. We are looking for someone with strong hands-on engineering ability, excellent product judgment, and the ambition to help define the company at the highest level. Role Description The CTO / Founding Technical Leader will own Clockout’s technical vision, architecture, and engineering execution while working closely with the CEO on product strategy. This person will lead the development of our mobile-first consumer platform, including AI-powered matching, social graph intelligence, clubs, events, messaging, recommendations, payments, growth loops, and personalization. They will be responsible for building scalable systems, improving product velocity, raising engineering quality, and turning Clockout’s early traction into a durable consumer platform. The ideal candidate is both a strong builder and a strong product thinker. They should be able to make high-level architectural decisions, recruit and lead engineers, ship quickly, and also have sharp instincts around user behavior, retention, onboarding, social mechanics, and consumer product experience. This role is best suited for someone who wants to be a company-defining technical leader, not just an engineering manager. What You’ll Own Define and lead Clockout’s technical vision, architecture, and engineering roadmap. Build and scale a high-quality mobile-first consumer product used by hundreds of thousands of users. Work directly with the CEO on product strategy, prioritization, experimentation, and growth. Lead development across matching, recommendations, messaging, clubs, events, payments, notifications, and AI-driven personalization. Improve engineering velocity, reliability, security, data infrastructure, and system scalability. Recruit, manage, and mentor a high-performing engineering team. Establish the engineering culture, development standards, and technical decision-making process. Balance speed and quality in a fast-moving startup environment. Qualifications Prior 0→1 or 1→10 experience at a consumer mobile, social, marketplace, community, events, or networking product. Ideally served as a founding engineer, CTO, technical founder, early engineering leader, or senior product-minded engineer at a startup that reached meaningful user scale. Strong hands-on software engineering background, with the ability to contribute technically and evaluate architecture/code quality. Experience building and scaling consumer-facing products with large user bases. Strong product instincts and a deep understanding of onboarding, activation, retention, social mechanics, recommendations, and growth loops. Experience leading engineering teams and working closely with product, design, data, and growth. Strong technical judgment across mobile, backend systems, data, infrastructure, AI/ML integrations, security, and scalability. Ability to move quickly, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and operate in an ambitious early-stage environment. Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate technical decisions into business and product impact. Preferred Background Experience with mobile-first products, especially iOS / React Native / Swift / consumer app development. Experience with social graph, matching, recommendations, messaging, events, community, or marketplace products. Experience building AI-powered personalization or recommendation systems. Experience recruiting and managing early engineering teams. Founder, founding engineer, or early employee experience at a startup that reached millions of users is a major plus. Compensation Competitive salary, large equity package, and the opportunity to become a defining technical leader at a fast-growing consumer startup.