- Location
- San Francisco, CA, United States · Remote
- Compensation
- $100k – $180k • 25.0% – 40.0%
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience level
- MID (2–5 years exp)
- Specialization
- Founder, Wellfound
- Source
- Wellfound
Co-Founder/CTO Wanted: Build the AI Deal Engine for Grocery Retail ($50M+ Executive Exp + Active Waitlist)
Grocery prices have skyrocketed, but deal data remains fragmented across dozens of regional store networks. We’re building an AI-powered smart grocery routing platform that maps customer shopping lists (text, photo, or voice) directly to the cheapest local deals in seconds.
About the Role We are seeking an ambitious, hands-on Technical Co-Founder / CTO to architect and build our core AI matching and deal aggregation engine from the ground up (0-to-1).
You will own the technical strategy, data processing pipelines, and system architecture, starting as the primary builder and evolving into our technical executive as we raise funding and scale the engineering team.
What You Will Do Build the 0-to-1 MVP: Lead end-to-end development of the core mobile/web application, backend APIs, and database structures.
Architect Data Scraping & Aggregation: Design resilient, scalable web scraping/crawling pipelines to pull real-time store pricing and deal updates at scale (waitlist on markets that will share data throgh APIs)
Integrate Multimodal AI Workflows: Build and optimize OCR/NLP pipelines that translate unstructured inputs (handwritten lists, photos, voice notes) into structured store SKUs.
Develop Routing & Price Logic: Create optimization algorithms that compare multi-item grocery lists across regional stores to deliver the best price-to-distance options for users.
Scale the Tech Org: Hire, evaluate, and manage future engineers, contractors, and tech teams as we raise capital.
Who We Are Looking For Strong experience in Python, Node.js, Go, or similar stack, along with web scraping frameworks (Playwright, Scrapy, Puppeteer).
Practical experience calling/implementing Multimodal LLM APIs, OCR engines (Tesseract, Vision API), or vector retrieval.
Focuses on shipping features that customers love rather than over-engineering premature abstractions.
Compensation & Structure Role: Co-Founder / Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Equity: 20% – 40% (Vesting with a 1-year cliff) Location: Remote-first (flexible timezone) Commitment: Open to a brief part-time ramp-up transitioning into full-time upon key milestones/funding.
Why Partner With Me? I haven’t just sat on an idea—I’ve already validated market demand with an active consumer waitlist and fully mapped product wireframes/prototypes ready for buildout.
My core background is in Product, with high-level network access and experience operating inside $50M+ ARR scaling companies. I bring go-to-market execution, investor access, and business strategy to the table. I handle product vision, fundraising, growth, partner/store co-working, and consumer ops 100%. You own the engineering roadmap, system architecture, and AI models as an equal partner.
True Equity Partnership: I am offering a co-founder-level equity stake (20%–40%) with a standard vesting plan + 1-year cliff. You are coming in as a peer, not an employee.