Founding Software Engineer II

The role

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

This role is for engineers with at least two years of professional experience. The base salary is $100,000–$120,000 a year, depending on experience. ZigTale also offers an equity grant of 1–2% of ZigTale, Inc., subject to board approval, and pays up to $2,000 a month for the AI models and coding tools you build with.

You'll own your work end to end from day one, 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 priorities and the quality bar, and review your work. You'll decide how to build what we agree on, and 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.

Fewer than two years of professional experience? Apply to our entry-level posting, Founding Software Engineer, on our careers page at https://zigtale.applytojob.com instead. Already applied there and have two or more years? Apply here too, so we can see your answers for this role.

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

• Own features and fixes in our TypeScript and React web app: plan them, build them, get them reviewed, and ship them as tested releases to 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.
• Spend our AI budget like it's your own: use the models and tools that earn their cost, and tell us when they stop earning it.
• 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

This role needs real production experience. We judge that by what you've built and can show us, not by titles or company names. You'll need:

• At least two years of professional software engineering. You've been paid to build software people rely on, as an employee, a contractor or a freelancer. You've shipped features from first design to release and fixed them when they broke in production.
• 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. If your employer limits AI tools at work, show us what you've built with them on your own.
• 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.
• Ownership from day one. Given a feature, you scope it, plan the build, flag what's risky and ask for review at the right moments. You don't need step-by-step direction.
• 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'd work mostly remotely. You live in or near Lancaster (including the York, Harrisburg or Reading areas), or will before your first day, and can attend in-person meetings in Lancaster at least once a week at a company-designated location.

Nice to have

• You've been the first or only engineer on a product.
• 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

• Base salary: $100,000–$120,000 a year, depending on experience.
• Equity: An equity grant of 1–2% of ZigTale, Inc., subject to board approval.
• AI budget: ZigTale pays up to $2,000 a month for your AI models and coding tools.
• Schedule: Full-time.
• Location: Mostly remote, with in-person meetings in Lancaster, PA at least once a week at a company-designated location. You need to live in or near Lancaster, including the York, Harrisburg or Reading areas, by your first day.
• Relocation: We don't offer relocation help. If you'd move to the area, you'd need to be living there before your first day.
• Manager: An advisor to ZigTale, based in Lancaster, who works with ZigTale part-time.

How to apply

Apply through this posting. A person reviews every application. Some things are firm requirements for this role: living in or near Lancaster by your first day, making the weekly in-person meetings, and being authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship.

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

1. Where you live, whether you can make the weekly in-person meetings, your work authorization, and a few other logistics.
2. Your LinkedIn profile, or a GitHub profile or personal site of your own.
3. Links to one to three things you built with AI: a live app, a repo with its commit history, or a short demo video.
4. For one of them: what the AI did, what you did, and the worst thing you had to fix.
5. A feature or fix you owned in production: the hardest call you made, what you got wrong at first, and what happened after it shipped.
6. Roughly how many AI tokens you use in a typical week, or whether you're on a flat-rate or employer plan. We aren't looking for the biggest number.
7. 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.
8. 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.

How we review: we open every link, read commit histories, and check that your resume, your LinkedIn or other profile, and your answers agree on where you live, where you've worked and what you built. Answers like "N/A" give us nothing to review. You're welcome to use AI to help you write, but the facts have to be yours, because our first call starts from them.

What happens next:

1. Management reviews your answers and your work.
2. A 30-minute video call with the advisor you'd report to, including a walk-through of one of the things you linked.
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.