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-founder—you 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. You’ll be a core member of the founding team, with significant influence over technology, strategy, and execution—along with meaningful equity upside.

What You’ll Do

• Strategic Thought Partnership. You aren't just taking requirements. You’ll 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. You’ll 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 hands-on, with things like producing code, vetting out ideas, white boarding, holding healthy debates, moving from prototype to production-grade software at high velocity, ensuring security and building to learn what provides value to your target customers.

• Architect for the Future. You’ll set the engineering culture, use modern tools and tech to move fast, leveraging AI-assisted dev tools, and be in charge of evolving the system to meet business needs.

• Work hard. Thrive within the inherent "beautiful mess" of a pre-Series A startup, maintaining a high-conviction, low-attachment mindset that allows you to embrace ambiguity and navigate technical setbacks with the resilience needed to turn hard problems into a category-defining company.

• Build a solid relationship with your founding team, rooted in radical candor and mutual reliance; play to each other’s 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 We’re Looking For

• Founder mentality – ownership, resourcefulness, and the ability to thrive in ambiguity.

• Product-first engineering mindset – focus on delivering customer value over technical complexity.

• Full-stack – 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 – prior work at an early-stage company or high-growth 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 – you move fast, make pragmatic trade-offs, and iterate efficiently.

• High-Agency & Bias for Action: You don't wait for a roadmap; you help draw it. You make pragmatic trade-offs, ship daily, and iterate based on data rather than assumptions.

• AI-Native Developer: You’ve moved beyond manual coding. You leverage tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or other agentic tools to generate code and to amplify your output, and you’re excited about integrating LLMs into core product features.

• Seasoned Technical Leader: You have the "scar tissue" from early-stage startups or high-growth 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 isn’t a 9-5 burden for you

• You’ve previously co-founded or seriously attempted to co-found a company.

• You have strong, well-reasoned views on developer experience, technology choices, and product-market fit—but you’re humble enough to evolve your opinions as you expand your knowledge.

• You’re energized by 0→ 1 work: greenfield builds, rapid prototyping, first-customer feedback loops.

• You’re based in or willing to relocate to the Utah / Silicon Slopes area.

This is not a soft landing. It’s a launchpad. We’re 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 high-potential, venture-backed 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 – you’ll have real ownership over your work.

• A collaborative, mission-driven environment – working alongside world-class founders and a well-established venture studio.

If all of this is exciting to you and you think you’d 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.

Division

Philo Studio

Locations

Pleasant Grove, UT

Remote status

Hybrid