Software Engineer (Mobile & Platform)
📍 Remote | South Africa
🕒 Part-Time or Full-Time | EST Business Hours
💰 USD $2,500–$3,000
About the Opportunity
Social Refresh is partnering with an innovative US-based startup in the entertainment industry to recruit a Software Engineer (Mobile & Platform).
This is a rare opportunity to join an early-stage technology company that's building a mobile-first, family-friendly short-form streaming platform designed to deliver engaging, values-driven entertainment to audiences around the world.
As one of the company's first engineering hires, you'll play a critical role in preparing the platform for launch while helping shape the future of the engineering team.
This isn't a traditional QA role, nor is it a role focused solely on building new features.
Instead, you'll combine software engineering, platform ownership, quality assurance, infrastructure, observability and release management to ensure the platform is stable, scalable and production-ready.
As the product evolves, you'll naturally expand into broader full-stack engineering responsibilities across the mobile application, backend API and creator platform while helping establish the engineering standards that will support future growth.
If you enjoy solving complex technical challenges, improving systems, taking ownership and working in an early-stage startup where your work has a direct impact, this is an opportunity to build something meaningful from the ground up.
What You'll Do
Platform Engineering & Infrastructure
- Help improve the platform architecture and engineering foundations.
- Build and improve deployment pipelines and engineering workflows.
- Own observability, monitoring and production health.
- Help establish documentation, onboarding processes and engineering best practices.
- Improve developer experience and platform scalability.
Software Engineering
- Develop across the mobile application, backend API and creator platform.
- Build scalable TypeScript applications across multiple repositories.
- Contribute to architecture and technical decision-making.
- Collaborate closely with founders and leadership.
- Continuously improve code quality and platform performance.
Quality Engineering & Launch Readiness
- Test mobile applications across iOS and Android.
- Identify, reproduce and resolve bugs before production.
- Improve automated testing coverage.
- Strengthen platform reliability ahead of launch.
- Verify functionality using real devices and production-like environments.
What We're Looking For
Required
- Strong commercial experience with TypeScript.
- Strong experience with React Native or React.
- Experience building production mobile applications.
- Strong Node.js backend experience.
- Experience working across frontend and backend systems.
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
- Comfortable working across multiple technologies.
- A startup mindset with a high level of ownership.
- Excellent English communication skills.
Preferred
- Systems architecture and cloud infrastructure experience.
- Docker, containers and CI/CD pipelines.
- Production deployments and release management.
- Experience with observability platforms such as Sentry, Datadog or similar.
- Experience documenting systems and improving engineering processes.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or similar.
- Startup or founding engineering experience.
- An appreciation for UI/UX and product design.
Who You Are
- You naturally take ownership rather than waiting to be assigned work.
- You enjoy solving difficult engineering problems.
- You're proactive, curious and highly self-motivated.
- You enjoy improving systems rather than simply maintaining them.
- You communicate technical concepts clearly.
- You're comfortable wearing multiple hats in a startup.
- You care about product quality just as much as writing code.
- You're happy to participate in an on-call rotation as the engineering team grows.
Why Join?
- Become one of the company's first engineering hires.
- Help launch an exciting new mobile-first technology platform.
- Work directly alongside an experienced founding team.
- Influence architecture, engineering standards and technical direction from an early stage.
- High level of ownership and autonomy.
- Flexible remote working.
- Opportunity to grow into a senior technical leadership role as the company scales.
- Build technology that creates a positive impact for families and communities around the world.
Ready to Apply?
If you're a hands-on engineer who enjoys building great software, improving systems, solving complex technical challenges and taking ownership from day one, we'd love to hear from you.