Pod Connect, Inc

Founding Technical Lead, Consumer App
Abound (Pod Connect Inc.) | Fort Lauderdale, FL | On-site | Full-time
About Abound
Abound is a science-based social app built to solve one of the hardest problems in modern life: making real friends as an adult.
Most social and dating products optimize for volume and surface-level connection. Abound starts from compatibility. Members are matched on shared values using a model developed with our scientific advisor, a social psychologist who has spent her career studying how people form lasting bonds. Matched small groups (“pods”) then meet in person at venues around the city. The product is the friendship, not the feed.
We launch in Greater Fort Lauderdale in early 2027. The product, brand and matching system are built, vetted and founder-funded. Engineering to date has been delivered by a dedicated partner team working to our specification. The open seat is the technical owner in the building: the person who takes the product from launch through its first growth phase and makes the codebase, the data and the roadmap theirs.
The role
This is a founding-team position and the first in-house engineering seat. Through launch you work alongside the existing engineering team, learn the system end to end, and own release quality, instrumentation and reliability. After launch you own the stack outright: the mobile app, the backend, the matching pipeline, and the data infrastructure behind it. Two things make this more than a standard consumer app build. First, the matching model is the company; you will work directly with our scientific advisor to implement it faithfully and keep it measurable. Second, we are running a controlled study of the algorithm inside the live app in the first months after launch, matched groups against randomly assembled ones, and the integrity of that study rests on the instrumentation you build. As the company grows you will hire and lead the engineering team.
Who we are looking for
<ul>
<li>You have shipped consumer mobile apps to the App Store and Google Play that real people used, and you have lived with them in production. This is the requirement.</li>
<li>You are full-stack in practice: comfortable in the mobile client, the backend and the data layer, and able to make the whole thing work on your own when needed.</li>
<li>You treat personal data seriously. Our members tell us their values; you will design for that trust by default.</li>
<li>You have worked with, or taken over from, an external development team, and know how to do it without breaking what works.</li>
<li>You are fluent with current AI-assisted development tools and use them to move at the pace a small team needs.</li>
<li>You have had prior success and are looking for a founding stake in the next thing, not a salary.</li>
<li>You are based in, or will relocate to, the Miami / Fort Lauderdale area. This is not a remote role.</li>
</ul>
Compensation, and a frank note about it
Equity is the compensation, and for the first phase there is no salary. Please read this carefully. Through the trial period and the run-up to launch, roughly the next four to six months, this role pays no cash. Your equity grant is agreed before you start and vests from day one, with the trial period serving as the cliff, so the stake is real and it is yours as you earn it. But you will not receive a paycheck during that window. If you need income to cover your life in that time, this is the wrong role, and we would rather say so now than discover it three months in.
Once we are in market and the next round is closed, the role converts to a paid executive position with your equity intact. The right person has the runway to carry themselves until then and sees the trade clearly: a short period without salary in exchange for a large, early stake in a company they help build from the ground up.
How to apply
Send a short note, not a resume. Tell us what you have shipped and how many people used it, the hardest production problem you have solved, how you have worked with an outside team, and why Abound. Links to live apps or code beat descriptions. We will share the full stack and architecture in the first conversation.

Founding Technical Lead - Consumer App Development

Founding Technical Lead - Consumer App Development

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