Founding Engineer (→ CTO for the right person)

Hotwash | Founding Engineer (→ CTO for the right person) | REMOTE (US), Boston a plus | Full-time I'm a solo founder. I built the entire product myself, got 11 fire departments paying with zero churn, and now I need someone to own engineering so I can't be the only one who does. West Point, Ranger Regiment, Yale Law, still the only developer. What we do: Hotwash is an after-action review platform for fire departments. After a serious call, crews record what happened, we transcribe and structure it, and the hard-won lessons become searchable institutional memory instead of retiring when the veterans who earned them do. Fire is the wedge; the long game is operational learning for any high-reliability organization. Traction: $40K ARR, 11 paying fire departments, zero churn. Raising a $1M pre-seed. The role: Employee #1 on engineering. You own the codebase, architecture, and UX end to end, and you lead the rebuild off the current stack. You work directly with me on what gets built and why, including sitting with fire chiefs to figure out what they actually need. For the right person this becomes the CTO seat. Who I'm looking for: A full-stack engineer who ships simple, usable products and has a real eye for design. Our users are fire crews, not power users, so the bar is "obvious to someone who's never seen it." If you care about how software feels, not just whether it works, this is your seat. Stack: Today it's FlutterFlow + Firebase, Node, with Groq/AssemblyAI for transcription and Gemini for summarization. The rebuild target is React Native (Expo), Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2. You'd own that migration, so this is real greenfield ownership, not maintenance. Comp: Founding equity, scaled to scope. We're pre-raise, so cash is lean right now and grows when we close. Email hiring@hotwash.com with a resume, link to something you've built, and one line on why this interests you.