Technical Co-Founder in Residence
Philo Ventures is a venture studio dedicated to launching and scaling groundbreaking software startups on a regular basis. We facilitate matching founders with technical co-founders that are excited to work together to build something great!
We are looking for technical co-founders to bridge the gap between "zero" and "one." You aren't just an early hire; you are the technical architect and business partner in a new venture. Philo provides the capital, the operational support, and a non-technical co-founderโyou provide the technical expertise and the vision to build something amazing.
This is a rare opportunity to own the technical vision, shape the product roadmap, and lead the development of a high-impact platform early on. Youโll be a core member of the founding team, with significant influence over technology, strategy, and executionโalong with meaningful equity upside.
What Youโll Do
-
Strategic Thought Partnership. You aren't just taking requirements. Youโll work alongside your co-founder to navigate product-market fit, making critical pivots and product decisions based on conversations with potential customers.
-
Own the tech stack. Youโll represent the "how" and "why" of your technology to: your team, early adopters, potential investors, and future hires, acting as the primary technical voice of the venture.
-
Be very handsโon, with things like producing code, vetting out ideas, white boarding, holding healthy debates, moving from prototype to productionโgrade software at high velocity, ensuring security and building to learn what provides value to your target customers.
-
Architect for the Future. Youโll set the engineering culture, use modern tools and tech to move fast, leveraging AIโassisted dev tools, and be in charge of evolving the system to meet business needs.
-
Work hard. Thrive within the inherent "beautiful mess" of a preโSeries A startup, maintaining a highโconviction, lowโattachment mindset that allows you to embrace ambiguity and navigate technical setbacks with the resilience needed to turn hard problems into a categoryโdefining company.
-
Build a solid relationship with your founding team, rooted in radical candor and mutual reliance; play to each otherโs strengths to navigate the highs and lows of the startup journey, ensuring that when the venture succeeds, you win together as a united front.
-
Be supported by Philo Ventures' internal team, to accelerate your success with your founding team.
What Weโre Looking For
-
Founder mentality โ ownership, resourcefulness, and the ability to thrive in ambiguity.
-
Productโfirst engineering mindset โ focus on delivering customer value over technical complexity.
-
Fullโstack โ strong experience in frontend & backend development. Bring your own tech stack or get a head start by adopting our NextJS (React / Typescript) foundation.
-
Startup experience โ prior work at an earlyโstage company or highโgrowth tech startup is a huge plus.
-
A "0 to 1" Specialist: You thrive in the "blank canvas" stage. You are energized by greenfield builds, rapid prototyping, and the chaos of the first customer feedback loop.
-
Bias for action โ you move fast, make pragmatic tradeโoffs, and iterate efficiently.
-
HighโAgency & Bias for Action: You don't wait for a roadmap; you help draw it. You make pragmatic tradeโoffs, ship daily, and iterate based on data rather than assumptions.
-
AIโNative Developer: Youโve moved beyond manual coding. You leverage tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or other agentic tools to generate code and to amplify your output, and youโre excited about integrating LLMs into core product features.
-
Seasoned Technical Leader: You have the "scar tissue" from earlyโstage startups or highโgrowth environments. You have confidence with things like SQL, API design, healthy engineering practices, and system performance, with the communication skills to express technical tradeoffs to less technical people.
Signals We Value
-
You spend your weekends tinkering, building new things, testing new technologies; code isnโt a 9โ5 burden for you.
-
Youโve previously coโfounding or seriously attempted to coโfound a company.
-
You have strong, wellโreasoned views on developer experience, technology choices, and productโmarket fitโbut youโre humble enough to evolve your opinions as you expand your knowledge.
-
Youโre energized by 0โ1 work: greenfield builds, rapid prototyping, firstโcustomer feedback loops.
-
Youโre based in or willing to relocate to the Utah / Silicon Slopes area.
This is not a soft landing. Itโs a launchpad. Weโre looking for engineering focused founders who are ready to do the most impactful and hardest work of their careers.
What We Offer
-
Significant equity stake in a highโpotential, ventureโbacked startup.
-
Reduced risk and more focus on the core of your product. Philo Studios takes care of the mundane, supporting your team with things like an initial investment seed, legal, payroll, design, marketing, software engineering assistance and more, so that you and your founding team can focus more of your time on building a successful product.
-
Salary with meaningful founding equity, as well as benefits like health insurance.
-
A culture of innovation and autonomy โ youโll have real ownership over your work.
-
A collaborative, missionโdriven environment โ working alongside worldโclass founders and a wellโestablished venture studio.
If all of this is exciting to you and you think youโd be a strong candidate for this role, apply!
This job post represents multiple startups. As new startups are launched we will review the candidate pool and reach out to those candidates that most match the needs of the respective startup.
#J-18808-Ljbffr