Technical Co-Founder
Technical Co-Founder
Company: Prox
Location: Los Angeles, CA (preferred) / Remote
Role Type: Co-Founder, Full-Time
Compensation: High equity. Cash compensation exists but will be modest relative to the title — this is an early-stage startup, and we are honest about that.
Before You Read Further
Ask yourself two questions:
Can I lead the engineering of an entire consumer technology product — from architecture to production to the people who build it — beginning to end?
Does building the go-to place where Americans understand what groceries cost and where to shop actually excite me?
If both answers are yes, keep reading.
About Prox
Grocery prices vary significantly across retailers, yet consumers have almost no visibility into those differences. Prox brings pricing, deals, and product information across nearby retailers into one platform — helping users compare prices, find deals, and identify the lowest-cost way to fill their basket.
Our iOS app is live across major U.S. markets. We have real users, a growing retailer and product data infrastructure, and an early engineering team. We are now looking for a technical co-founder to help turn Prox from an early-stage product into a category-defining consumer company.
The Role
This is a true co-founder position. You will share ownership of the company's direction, not just its codebase.
You will work directly alongside the Founder & CEO and hold full ownership of everything technical at Prox — architecture, infrastructure, data systems, mobile product, engineering hiring, and engineering culture. You will be the person the company depends on to make hard technical decisions, ship product, and build the team that grows with us.
This is not a role where technical strategy gets handed to you. You will define it.
What You Will Own
- All technical strategy and engineering decisions at Prox
- Mobile application (iOS, React Native)
- Backend services, APIs, and data pipelines
- Grocery data infrastructure — scraping, ingestion, normalization, deduplication, matching
- Search and product discovery systems
- Database architecture and performance
- Cloud infrastructure, reliability, and cost
- Engineering hiring, management, and culture
- Converting user feedback directly into shipped product improvements
- Working with the CEO on product strategy and company priorities
You will remain hands-on in the codebase while also building and managing the engineering team. Both matter.
Who We're Looking For
We strongly prefer candidates with experience in one or more of the following spaces:
- Grocery, food, or retail technology (Instacart, Walmart, Kroger, DoorDash, Gopuff, or similar)
- CPG — consumer packaged goods platforms, brand data, or retail media
- Consumer data products where catalog quality, pricing, and product matching are central to the business
Beyond domain background, we are looking for someone with real, hands-on experience across:
- APIs — design, integration, reliability
- Web scraping and data acquisition at scale
- Search systems and product discovery
- Mobile and/or frontend development (UI/UX sensibility required — you do not need to be a designer, but you need to care about the user experience)
- Backend and data pipeline engineering
- Managing and mentoring engineers
Most importantly, you need to be someone who can close the loop between what users are telling us and what the product actually does. When users report friction, confusion, or missing functionality, your job is to translate that into real changes — not just engineering tickets.
Technical Background
Experience with some combination of the following is directly applicable to what we build:
React Native, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, Supabase, REST APIs, web scraping, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Railway, or similar), search systems, data pipelines, product matching, and normalization.
We care more about your ability to think, build, and lead than whether you have touched every tool in our stack.
Compensation
We will be direct: cash compensation will be modest relative to what this title commands at a later-stage company. We are early. What we are offering is high equity; genuine co-founder equity commensurate with the role and the stage at which you are joining.
If you are at a point in your career where the cash number is the primary filter, this is probably not the right move right now. If you want meaningful ownership in something worth building, we should talk.
What Makes This Worth It
Prox already has a live product, real users, existing infrastructure, and a market that is large and underserved. You would not be starting from nothing. You would be joining at a stage where the technical and product problems are real, the foundation exists, and the decisions you make in the next 12 to 18 months will define what this company becomes.
Consumer grocery spending in the U.S. is over one trillion dollars annually. Retailers, CPG brands, and consumers all have strong reasons to want better price transparency. Prox sits in the middle of that.
Location
We are based in Los Angeles. We strongly prefer someone who can spend meaningful time working with the founding team here, particularly early on. Exceptional remote candidates in the U.S. will be considered but it is strongly preferred that you live in Los Angeles or are open to moving here.
How to Apply
Send your resume and, more importantly, examples of things you have built — GitHub, shipped products, startups, side projects, or anything that shows how you think and build.
In your application, tell us:
- Why do you want to be a startup co-founder rather than an engineering leader at an established company?
- Why does Prox specifically interest you?
- What is the most technically difficult product or system you have built, and what was your personal ownership of it?
- Have you worked in grocery, food, retail tech, or CPG? If so, where and in what capacity?
- What would you want to understand about Prox before deciding whether this is the right opportunity for you?
The core question this role asks of you is simple: can you own all of this, from the first line of architecture to the engineering organization that builds it, and do you want to?
If yes, we want to hear from you.