Founding Engineer

Offline exists to preserve the communities that bring people together in real life.

We believe we can make the world a more connected place by shifting the incentive system to reward the Host.

Our platform enables brands to launch and manage IRL activations at scale. We run an end-to-end product for both brands and agencies, from Host discovery with AI matchmaking & personalization, to automated contracting, payment integration and in-platform messaging, to social integration & Shopify connections for full-funnel measurement & reporting. The product is live and currently in the hands of our early partners.

We’re led by 2x founders that come from the brand and entertainment industries, with one working with people like Drake, Anthony Edwards, Nike, Riot Games, etc, and the other working with brands like Hinge, L’Oreal, Crocs, Spotify, etc.

In this role, you’ll be working directly with both founders as employee #2 and our first technical hire.

What You Do:

Listen for insight, lead with design, and ship (very) fast.

We spent 6 months servicing each ask over and over and over again, listening and feeling pain points throughout this process, so that when it came time to build, the product essentially built itself.

Now, as we onboard partners to the platform and rapidly increase our volume of sponsorship dollars, we’re ready for someone to step in and own engineering, product, auditing and building on our foundation to create a robust, efficient, design-led product system and team going forward.

We’ll look to you to help us either refactor or rebuild.

Our existing stack

is a modern TypeScript web app - React front end, Supabase/Postgres back end. We’ve used AI-native workflows to build fast on top of that.

We’ll continue with this process of using insights and design principles to build and shape the product path going forward. Which means your first job is to come in, to assess, to plan, and to jump in with intentionality and fearlessness, and with an instinct to listen first.

As the first technical hire, we're asking for a lot. We respect engineering and want to bring a product-led culture into Offline. We know there will be inevitable ambiguities with that - and we want to attack those ambiguities together.

Product Compass Prioritization and Planning

• Develop, prioritize, and own the product compass, mapping urgency vs importance of sprints and epics, with short/long-term effects.
• Work with founders and Head of Growth to listen closely to brand and host needs and insights to shape product compass

All hands on deck

• Whatever the moment needs. We’re a small team, growing fast, and defaulting to action is critical for our success.

Role Pros and Cons

PROS:

• We care a shit ton about the work because it matters. And we care a lot about each other, too.
• We're a crew, not a team. Teams play games to beat somebody. Crews set out to finish a mission where the stakes are real. no passengers, no bench, no substitutes. The work is real, has real impacts, and has a real-world consequence to failure.
• You will see your impact in real-time. hosts need us, and you’ll feel that. And it should be rewarding for your hard work to see that.
• We work hard. We expect a lot.

CONS:

• We don’t do the “cool kids” thing. We’re about the work; we’re generally just not interested in optimizing for people who work here to feel cool.
• We’re doing this because this problem deeply matters to us, so you’ll have to accept a high standard of not only the work, but how we carry ourselves in these rooms with hosts and clients.
• We work hard. We expect a lot.

Who fits (not requirements, but things we look for)

• Has shipped a real product end-to-end as the person who both decided what to build and merged it. You've held the roadmap and the branch at the same time
• Fluency with full-stack development & mobile, cloud platforms, working with LLMs, and building AI-agents.
• Some combo of: founding engineer at a seed-stage startup, design engineer, technical PM who shipped code, product lead at a two-sided marketplace
• Real bonus: influencer marketing or creator platform experience, or any marketplace with a contracting and payments layer. Our product is converging on that shape.
• Genuinely cares about the IRL community thesis - can articulate it unprompted. Maybe you've been a host yourself. and you understand the marketing industry enough to put yourself in a brand's POV
• Has an eye. You'll be designing as much as building, and you should have a point of view about what good looks like
• Detail-obsessed but ships fast, writing clear specs and making clear and intentional decisions, and communicating around them
• Comfortable interviewing, hiring, and building out a product & engineering crew with the right people on board.
• Pure PM or pure engineer - if you need an engineer to make anything real, or you want a spec handed to you, this isn't it
• Pure big-co product person - too process-bound for the ambiguity

DETAILS:

Comp: $200k-$260k

Equity: .75-1.25%

ABOUT OFFLINE INC.

Offline is the ad network for the real world. Backed by Techstars Spring 2026.