Founding CTO

About Gorge

Gorge is a live street food ordering platform. We connect customers with independent street food vendors across the city — browse menus, order ahead, skip the line. We are very early stage with a real product already in production. We are focused on Los Angeles as our launch market and eventually to other cities. This is a ground-floor opportunity. You will be the first technical hire at Gorge. You will set the technical direction, build the team, and have a meaningful ownership stake in what we build together.

The Role

We are looking for a Founding CTO who is both a strong technical leader and a builder — someone who can write code when needed, architect systems for scale, and mentor junior engineers and interns. This is not a purely managerial role. In the early days you will be hands-on. As we grow, you will transition into leading a team. You will work directly with the founder on every major product and technical decision. You will be the voice of technical reality in the room — someone who can translate vision into architecture, and architecture into shipped code. The right person for this role has built real products before, cares deeply about code quality and developer culture, and gets genuinely excited about the opportunity to own a major piece of something from day one.

What You Will Own

Technical Architecture:

• Own the full technical stack — from frontend to backend to infrastructure — making decisions that will scale with the business
• Architect the transition from our current vanilla JS single-page app to a maintainable, scalable framework as the codebase grows
• Lead the native mobile app build — iOS and Android using React Native or Capacitor — our most urgent technical priority
• Design and implement automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering practices that prevent regressions
• Own DevOps and infrastructure

Product Development:

• Translate product requirements into technical specs, working directly with the founder on feature prioritization
• Ship features fast without breaking things — the core challenge of early-stage startups
• Build the native mobile app — Capacitor wrapper as a fast path to App Store, evolving to full React Native
• Implement push notifications for order status updates — the most requested feature from early users Own Apple Sign In, account deletion, and full App Store compliance before iOS submission

Team Leadership:

• Mentor and guide software engineer interns — help them grow into real engineers, not just task-completers
• Set engineering culture — code review standards, documentation practices, deployment processes, and team norms
• Make the first engineering hires as the company grows
• Be the technical face of Gorge to investors, partners, and potential hires

What We Are Looking For

Required:

• 5\+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead role
• Full-stack proficiency — comfortable across frontend, backend, APIs, and database design
• Mobile development experience — React Native, Capacitor, or native iOS/Android — you have shipped a real app to a store
• Strong JavaScript fundamentals — you can read and improve our existing codebase on day one
• Payment integration experience — Stripe or similar, you understand webhooks, idempotency, and error handling
• A track record of shipping — you have built real products that real people use
• Mentorship mindset — you genuinely enjoy helping less experienced developers grow

Strongly preferred:

• Experience at an early-stage startup — you know what it means to move fast with limited resources
• Marketplace or platform experience — two-sided marketplace dynamics, vendor/customer flows, commission structures
• React Native expertise — needed for the mobile app build
• DevOps experience — CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring and alerting
• LA-based

You are a strong fit if you:

• Get excited about building things that haven't been built before, not just maintaining what exists
• Care as much about the business working as the code being clean
• Can context-switch between writing code, reviewing a pull request, and talking to a vendor in the same day
• Have strong opinions about technical decisions but hold them loosely — you listen before you decide
• Want to build and mentor a team, not just be a solo contributor forever
• Believe street food vendors deserve better tools than what exists today

Compensation \& What We Offer

• Equity: 2-5% depending on experience and commitment level, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. This is real founding equity in a company being built from the ground up in a large and underserved market.
• Salary: Equity only while we build toward revenue — this is the honest truth. Once Gorge reaches consistent monthly revenue, we introduce a base salary. If we raise a seed round, market-rate CTO compensation applies immediately.

Everything else:

• Real ownership of technical decisions — we will not second-guess your architectural choices
• A product that matters — street food vendors are underserved by every tech platform that exists
• Flexible schedule — we care about output, not hours logged
• The chance to build a team your way, from day one

How to Apply

Email [email protected] with subject line: Founding CTO — [Your Name]

Include:

• Your Resume
• Links to anything live — apps, products, GitHub, anything you have shipped that we can look at
• Why Gorge — what about this specific opportunity excites you. We will ignore generic answers
• Your honest situation — are you currently employed? What would it take to make this work? Be direct

We will respond to every serious application personally, from the founder. No recruiters, no HR filters. If this is the right fit, we will move fast.

Gorge LLC · Los Angeles, CA · eatgorge.com Equal opportunity — we welcome applicants of all backgrounds.