Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer Starlight Sports Inc. · Fairfield County, CT (hybrid) · Full-time Comp: $75,000–$90,000 + 3–6% equity Company Description Starlight is a video-native sports platform. Two lines of business, both live and generating revenue: Event film — contractors film lacrosse and other youth/club events; footage is captured, processed, and sold through our platform.Recruiting SaaS — a platform for athletes, club directors, and college coaches: player authentication (StarPass), game film access, and recruiting log tracking.We're building the video layer for club sports — capture, live stream, process, tag, and distribute — and the recruiting workflow that sits on top of it. Job Description This is the first senior engineering hire. Today the video platform is built and shipped. The recruiting platform is built and being tested by over 100 beta users. You would take ownership of the codebase and the roadmap, and be the person who decides how software gets built here. You will not be handed a spec. You'll be handed a live platform with real customers, real video infrastructure, real AWS bills, and a long list of things that need to be better. Your job is to decide what matters, build it, and put the process in place so the next five engineers can move fast without breaking things. What you'll own Product engineering The recruiting platform end to end — auth, film access, coach and club-director workflows, paymentsThe event/film operations side: roster management, event data model, film deliveryShipping features weekly, not quarterlyVideo infrastructure Live pipeline: encoder → Starlink → RTMP → Amazon IVS → CloudFront, with JWT-gated playbackVOD pipeline: S3 → MediaConvert → signed-URL deliveryKeeping AWS spend sane. Video costs get expensive fast and cost work is engineering work here.Engineering foundations (near-term priority) Staging environment, branching strategy, CI/CD, code reviewError tracking and alerting (Sentry today), product analytics, security scanningTest coverage where it actually buys us somethingAI / computer vision (as it matures) We're training a YOLOv9-based model for player/referee/ball detection and building an "AI breakdown" to auto-tag clips and playersCurrently sandboxed on EC2 GPU + S3, partitioned from productionYou don't need to be an ML engineer, but you should be able to own the infrastructure and productionizationTeam Hire and lead the engineers who come after youSet the technical bar and the culture around it Required & Nice to Haves Experience building and shipping production web applications, with meaningful ownership — not just executing tickets inside a large teamStrong Ruby on Rails experience, or deep expertise in a comparable server-rendered framework plus a credible case that you'll be productive in Rails within weeksReal full-stack range. You're comfortable in Postgres, background jobs, and browser JavaScript. Server-rendered/hypermedia frontends (Hotwire, HTMX, LiveView) or a genuine willingness to work that way rather than reaching for ReactProduction AWS experience — S3, IAM, EC2, and cost awareness at minimum. You've been on the hook for an infrastructure bill before.You've built the process, not just followed it. You've stood up CI/CD, environments, branching strategy, monitoring, or on-call somewhere — ideally at a company small enough that nobody else was going to.Startup-stage judgment. You can tell the difference between debt worth taking and debt that kills you, and you can explain that tradeoff to a non-engineerDirect communication. You'll be working closely with a founder who wants honest pushback, not agreementComfortable being the only engineer for a stretch, and comfortable hiring your way out of thatBackground in sports, youth athletics, or the recruiting ecosystem — lacrosse especiallyExperience with contractor/field-ops-facing toolingYou've been a technical hiring manager Why Starlight You get a platform that already has customers and revenue, a category (club sports video and recruiting) that's underbuilt and fragmented, and genuinely hard technical problems in video and CV. Founding-engineer equity, direct line to the CEO, and the title and scope grow with the company. Apply Email jacob@starlighttv.net with: Something you've built that you own end to end — repo, product, or write-upTwo or three sentences on the hardest infrastructure or scaling problem you've personally solvedAnything you want us to know that a resume doesn't coverNo cover letter required. We'll respond either way. Starlight Sports Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.