Project Architect & Full-stack engineer

About the job

In short

• Role: Project Architect & Full-stack engineer
• Type: Part-time contract (independent contractor)
• Commitment: ~15–20 hrs/week initially, self-managed, scaling with milestones
• Comp: $0 cash at this stage, equity-equivalent via Class C units (below)
• Path: Lead Full-Stack / Solutions Architect → Principal Engineer / Technical Director → Studio CTO → Technical Co-Founder

Company Description

my19th is a start-up holding and venture incubator, focused on spinning out projects into stand-alone subsidiaries. The team specializes in creative solutions spanning multiple industries, possessing access to niche verticals, and pursues unique solutions to attack real problems, validating them quickly, using data-driven and experimental approaches to rapid prototype and pilot products and services. The operating philosophy centers on persistence, patience, and perspective, ensuring only the most resilient ideas move forward and the team embodies these.

Role Description

You will be the technical owner and delivery champion of a single product: a mobile-first event & stakeholder communication platform. You own its design, specification, build, delivery, and support end-to-end. I cover business strategy, funding, and corporate structure. You will partner directly with our Enterprise Business Development & Growth Director—a dedicated commercial hunter focused on landing major pilot accounts. Your split is the deal: they source and close executive relationships at mega-venues; you deliver the flawless, high-scale technology that makes good on their promises. This is not a seat on a roadmap team. It is a technical partnership built for rapid commercial execution and ownership of an outcome.

What's Live Today

A functional POC in soft launch/alpha optimized for enterprise, multi-stakeholder demonstrations:

• Password auth with role system (participants, staff, admins)
• Real-time status updates with schedule-based estimations
• Admin dashboard with analytics used in investor, sponsor, and premium venue conversations
• Self-contained, open-source friendly, no external service dependencies

Where it's headed

Our roadmap is explicitly designed to solve complex communication and operational friction within high-traffic, premium consumer ecosystems. We are building a platform capable of scaling to the logistical and spatial demands of environments like Mall of America, Disney World, the PGA Tour/The Masters, and major cruise networks (e.g., Carnival HUB ecosystem).

To support our enterprise growth engine, you will design our architecture to be highly modular, allowing the team to quickly spin up localized features, sponsor brand integrations, and custom venue configurations as our commercial growth director secures new pilot cohorts.

Specifically, you will lead the architecture for:

• Offline/P2P mesh deployment for venues with congested or unreliable cellular networks (stadiums, remote golf courses, cruise ships)
• Multi-venue scaling and enhanced RBAC to manage thousands of concurrent staff, vendors, and VIP participants simultaneously
• Digital-Physical ("Phygital") commerce features, including localized sponsor activations, live promotions, and real-time crowd-flow optimization
• Emerging tech exploration (blockchain/smart contracts for secure access, AR/VR for venue navigation, embedded systems) evaluated strictly on ROI vs. effort. When something is outside your expertise, you'll tell me so and help find who has it. Honesty about knowledge gaps is an expectation here, not a weakness.

Opportunity

• Niche: Sports, entertainment, and mega-venue experiential engagement—a sector driving a $170B+ annual economic impact that remains deeply underserved by modern digital tools.
• Validated need: Target users directly defined the product; informal stakeholder interviews with operators in these verticals have already confirmed severe demand.
• Growth trajectory: Event technology is projected to grow at an aggressive 15–18% CAGR through 2034–2035.
• Go-to-market: Commercial viability via Pilot Partnership and subsidized Pilot Program agreements with target enterprise customers—that's the revenue path, and you'll support it technically alongside our Growth Director via technical discovery, pre-sales solutioning, and rapid pilot iterations.

Compensation

Zero cash compensation at this stage. Equity-equivalent compensation via Class C membership units, issued under a written agreement modeled on SAFE principles: an agreed exchange rate for time contributed and/or capital deployed, converting or distributing upon defined profitability or financing events. Terms are documented up front and not negotiated after you've invested months of work.

Starting terms: 1–5% equity equivalent of the project venture, milestone-vested.

Important scope note: project equity is scoped to the specific project venture you contribute to, and not the holding company/incubator dba my19th.com, or other projects in the studio portfolio. As you climb the ladder below, studio-level equity becomes available. Capital contributions may qualify for a separate preferred conversion rate ("day-zero" terms), negotiated in writing before deployment.

Why project-level first? Because 1–5% of one venture you built is larger, faster, and clearer than a sliver of a multi-project studio. Studio-level ownership is earned through the ladder, not granted at intake.

The Ladder

This studio has many projects in discovery. If we collaborate well, there is room to grow well beyond a single product. The path we've designed, and intend to offer the right person, looks like this:

1. Lead Full-Stack / Solutions Architect: owns one product end-to-end
   • Gate: ship v1 to real users, meet the quality/delivery bar, mutual fit review
2. Principal Engineer / Technical Director: owns 2+ products concurrently, mentors builders
   • Gate: multiple shipped products + demonstrated cross-project prioritization
3. Studio CTO / Head of Engineering: cross-project standards, architecture governance, hires and leads your own team
   • Gate: sustained track record + studio-level technical strategy adopted
4. Technical Co-Founder: co-ownership and shared governance of the studio
   • The final stage isn't a title we award — it's a partnership we enter when the track record makes it inevitable.

What accelerates the path

• Delivery Velocity: shipping commercially viable products ahead of plan, not just on plan.
• Commercial-Technical Velocity: Seamlessly collaborating with our growth engine to rapidly de-risk technical objections during the sales process and shipping stable pilot deployments that turn testing accounts into multi-year enterprise contracts.
• Commercial Contribution: helping land pilot partnerships or pre-sales; bringing or brokering capital toward the work.
• Talent Multiplication: recruiting contractors and subject-matter experts into the studio, and knowing where your own expertise ends. A-players recruit A-players.
• Studio-level Judgment: prioritizing across projects, including deprioritizing your own when the portfolio demands it.

Authority scales the same way: from day one you have a voice in hiring, roadmap, and fundraising; at each rung that voice becomes accountability. At every rung, scope expands faster than comfort.

Responsibilities

• Architect, spec, build, deliver, and support the product end-to-end.
• Own the tech stack: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TanStack Query, Wouter / Node.js + Express / PostgreSQL (Drizzle ORM) / Replit hosting. Evaluate and select future tooling per project—the studio is opinionated only about shipping.
• Serve as the technical authority in enterprise sales conversations, partnering with our Growth Director to handle corporate IT discovery, architecture deep-dives, data privacy compliance, and live software demonstrations for risk-averse enterprise buyers.
• Collaborate on architecture decisions using peer/pair programming practices.
• Establish architectural patterns for multi-venue scaling, ensuring ultra-low latency and local cache strategies for zero-connectivity environments.
• Partner with AI development tools (Cursor, Replit Agent, etc.) to accelerate delivery.
• Make cost-effective infrastructure, tooling, and licensing decisions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years modern full-stack development with our exact stack: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TanStack Query, Wouter / Node.js + Express / PostgreSQL (Drizzle ORM).
• Comfortable with ambiguity: take a rough idea and architect a highly scalable solution that can adapt to changing pilot requirements.
• Self-directed but proactive in communication—especially in syncing with non-technical business and growth partners.
• Commitment: when you say you'll do something, nobody chases you down.
• Time management: this runs alongside other obligations; you own your schedule.
• Lean-startup instincts: MVP-first, simplicity over complexity.
• Currently employed or otherwise stable, this role is designed to be proven in part-time before it ever asks more of you.

Bonus

Experience building or architecting location-based tech, high-traffic consumer mobile products, marketplace/B2B SaaS, event/fan-engagement tools, offline-first applications, mesh networking, payments, GIS/mapping, igaming/e-gaming, AR/VR, robotics, or aviation/RC vehicles. Prior founding-role or early-stage experience. Finally: open source, open-weight, and blockchain.

OUR VALUES

Simplicity over complexity · Users over technology · Sustainable pace, this is a marathon; we jog or we get left behind · Transparency · Craft

HOW TO APPLY

Connect on LinkedIn (the founder posts and replies personally), or email [email protected] directly. Include:

1. Who you are and why this interests you, briefly.
2. LinkedIn, portfolio, or GitHub.
3. The last thing you built and shipped, however small, and what broke after launch.
4. The number of hours per week you can ACTUALLY commit, realistically, not aspirational.
5. One question about this role that tells us you read past the first paragraph.

I'll reach out to schedule a call, walk through our process, and see if there's synergy.