Founding Software Engineer

The role

ZigTale is hiring its first full-time engineer. You'll build our app every day, remotely, with weekly in-person meetings, and with AI models and coding agents in the loop.

You'll own your work end to end, not just close tickets. You'll care about the tap that feels 100 ms too slow, the illustration that's slightly off, and the parent email with a typo in it. Then you'll fix them, test them on a real phone, and ship.

You'll report to an advisor to ZigTale who built the current platform and works with ZigTale part-time. He'll manage you, set the quality bar and review your work; you'll be the one person building ZigTale full-time. Our founders, Vincenzo and Carla, aren't based in Lancaster and work with us remotely.

About ZigTale

ZigTale (https://zigtale.com) brings a child's own drawings, voice and ideas into stories that grow over time, chapter by chapter. Our goal is simple: use technology with care, so children’s imagination can grow bigger.

It started with a drawing. Our founders, Vincenzo and Carla, are engineers by training and parents at heart. One morning their son finished a pen drawing of a submarine adventure and wished he could tell everything happening in it. From the other room came a second voice: “Yes! I want to tell that adventure too!” ZigTale exists because every child carries stories worth bringing to life.

What we believe:

• Imagination comes first. AI follows a child's imagination — it never replaces it.
• For families, with families. Parents stay in control, and beta families shape what we build.
• Technology with purpose. Kids create; less passive screen time, not more.
• Safe, simple and meaningful. Age-appropriate content in a protected creative space.

We're in beta today: selected families use ZigTale as a web app on their phones.

What you'll do

• Ship features and fixes end to end in our TypeScript and React web app, from ticket to a tested release on staging and production.
• Own the quality of our AI features: prompts, model choice, speed, cost, and what happens when a provider fails.
• Test on real phones and tablets (iPhone, iPad and Android), the devices families actually use, and keep screenshot evidence before you call something done.
• Protect children's data: privacy-first design, parental consent, content moderation, and COPPA-minded habits in every change.
• Run several AI coding agents at once, review their output like a skeptic, and keep tests and release checks green.
• Read what beta families tell us, find the friction, and fix it fast.
• Write down what you learn: runbooks, incident notes, and the reasons behind decisions.

What you'll bring

We care more about what you've built than how many years you've been doing it. You'll need:

• You build with AI most days. Frontier models (Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Google's Gemini) and coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) are how you work now. You can show us what you built with them.
• You've shipped software people use. A production web app, a client project, or a side project with real users.
• Solid engineering and devops fundamentals. TypeScript and React, SQL databases, APIs, and debugging problems in production. If your strength is another language, show us how you've picked up a new one.
• Hands-on generative media. You've used at least one image, video or voice model in something you built — for example Runway, ElevenLabs, or Gemini's image models.
• A skeptic's eye for AI output. You read the diff, write the test, and catch the model when it's confidently wrong.
• An obsession with details. You notice the misaligned pixel and the confusing sentence, and you follow through until they're fixed.
• Clear writing. You can explain what changed, why, and what's still risky.
• Full-time, with weekly in-person meetings. ZigTale would be your only full-time job. You work remotely at least five days a week and can attend in-person meetings at least once a week at a company-designated location.

Nice to have

• Experience building or researching products for kids, families or education, such as user research with children and parents.
• Working knowledge of children's privacy (COPPA) and privacy-by-design.
• You've shipped a progressive web app or mobile app and fought iOS Safari's quirks.
• You've built evaluations to compare models on quality, speed and cost.
• Experience with cloud hosting, Postgres and CI pipelines.
• A feel for illustration, animation, voice or storytelling.

Pay and logistics

• Salary: $70,000 a year.
• Equity: Yes, an equity grant in ZigTale, Inc., subject to board approval.
• Schedule: Full-time.
• Location: Remote, at least five days a week, with in-person meetings at least once a week at a company-designated location.
• Manager: Advisor based in Lancaster (advisor, part-time).

How to apply

Apply through this posting. A few screening answers, such as availability for weekly in-person meetings and work authorization, end an application automatically.

Along with your resume (required), the form asks for:

1. Links to one to three things you built with AI: a live app, a repo with its commit history, or a short demo video.
2. For one of them: what the AI did, what you did, and the worst thing you had to fix.
3. Roughly how much you use AI in a typical week: tokens, monthly spend or the plan you're on, whichever you track. We aren't looking for the biggest number.
4. A short excerpt of the instructions you give your coding agents (a CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or rules file), or a description of your setup.
5. The one detail you'd fix first on app.zigtale.com, and how you'd check that it's fixed.

Only send work you have the right to share — nothing confidential to a current or former employer or client.

What happens next:

1. Management reviews your answers and your work.
2. A 30-minute video call with our Advisor in Lancaster.
3. A two-hour build session in person in Lancaster, on a sample problem (not our real code), using your own AI setup.
4. A video call with our founders, then a decision.

Equal opportunity

ZigTale is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race (including hair texture and protective hairstyles), color, religion (including religious head coverings and hairstyles), ancestry, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression), age, disability, known association with a person with a disability, familial status, marital status, possession of a GED instead of a high school diploma, use of a guide or support animal, citizenship status, genetic information, veteran or military status, or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.

If you need an accommodation for any step (the application form, a video call or the build session), or our form doesn't work with your assistive technology, email info@zigtale.com and we'll arrange it.