CTO / Co-founder (FRIDAY)
Compensation:
- Salary $120,000 - $250,000, wide range, scales with funding rounds execution and experience.
- Equity (negotatable)
- Token allocation starting from TGE ($1,000,000 - $5,000,000 over 5 years)
Location: UK or USA (remote-friendly)
E-commerce is “solved” in the same way airports are “solved.”
Technically, yes. Spiritually, no.
FRIDAY is building the personal commerce layer that turns shopping from cognitive chaos into certainty. Phase 1 is discovery and intent fulfillment. Phase 2 becomes a closed-loop ecosystem with token-powered incentives and rewards.
We’ve got a strong V1 demo ready and we ship in February. Now we need a CTO / Co-founder to help take this from “this is impressive” to “this is inevitable.”
If you can build serious systems, lead a team, and still keep product taste intact, you’ll love this.
The mission
We’re obsessed with fixing what’s broken in e-commerce: the journey is fragmented, noisy, and trust-poor. People don’t need more options. They need the right options, at the right moment, with a system they can trust.
FRIDAY is built at the intersection of:
- Agentic AI (tool-using agents that can do real work)
- RAG systems (high-signal retrieval, grounded outputs, reliable pipelines)
- Privacy-first / ZK architecture (verifiable claims, minimal data leakage, modern trust primitives)
- Commerce infrastructure (catalog intelligence, ingestion, ranking, integrations over time)
- Token infrastructure + rewards (introduced at the start of Phase 2)
What you’ll do
This is a co-founder role. You’re not “maintaining a backlog.” You’re shaping the machine.
Core responsibilities
- Own the technical vision and architecture across AI systems + product + platform
- Lead the build of V2, building on the V1 foundation shipping in February
- Design and harden the agent stack: orchestration, tool use, memory, safety rails, evals
- Build and scale RAG pipelines: retrieval quality, ranking, grounding, observability, iteration loops
- Drive privacy-first design, including ZK-oriented primitives where they create real user trust
- Lead engineering execution: planning, shipping cadence, quality standards, hiring influence
- Partner closely with the founders on product decisions, strategy, investor narrative, and sequencing
- Lay the groundwork for Phase 2 token rewards infrastructure (without turning the product into a casino)
The technical profile we want
You’re a builder with taste. You can architect. You can ship. You can explain.
Must-haves
- Deep experience building production systems end-to-end
- Strong grasp of agents + LLM orchestration (tool calling, memory patterns, evals)
- Strong grasp of RAG / retrieval systems (embeddings, reranking, grounding, feedback loops)
- Solid backend fundamentals: APIs, queues, data pipelines, search/ranking, observability
- Security and privacy instincts (you think in threat models, not just features)
- Leadership capability: you can raise the bar and bring people with you
Strong plus
- ZK / privacy-preserving architectures (or real curiosity + ability to learn fast)
- Consumer product engineering experience (latency, UX constraints, “this must feel good”)
- Commerce infrastructure experience (catalogs, feeds, pricing, availability, integrations)
- Experience building systems that must be reliable under messy real-world data
Your first 90 days (what “great” looks like)
- Establish a V2 architecture that scales Phase 1 and doesn’t block Phase 2
- Ship meaningful V2 improvements quickly (not theoretical refactors)
- Put proper evaluation + telemetry in place so we can measure truth, not vibes
- Build an elite engineering rhythm across the lead engineer + multiple developers
Team + stage
- Pre-seed round in motion
- Team has experience raising multiple large rounds
- You’ll be involved in both execution and fundraising conversations early
This is a real build. Real stakes. Real upside.
Compensation
- Meaningful co-founder equity
- Token allocation (Phase 2 aligned)
- Salary package available after February
Until then, we operate lean and focused
We’ll be straightforward about structure. No ambiguity, no games.
Why this is worth doing
Because if agents are going to act on behalf of people, commerce is one of the first categories that becomes completely different.
The question is simple:
When AI goes from “recommending” to “executing,” who owns the moment of purchase?
We’re building FRIDAY to own that moment.
How to apply
Send:
- A short note on what you’ve built that you’re proud of
- Links to products, repos, papers, or systems you’ve shipped
- A sentence on why FRIDAY resonates with you (not an essay
