Full Stack Mobile Engineer (Founding Engineer - Remote, Colombia)
Full Time Employee
Job Summary
You'll be the first engineer on PaletAI and the technical owner of the core system that turns text prompts into playable games. Job Description
We are
building a "TikTok for AI‑generated mini‑games." Creators type a prompt, PaletAI uses Anthropic/OpenAI APIs to generate a playable HTML5 game, and players swipe through a mobile feed of games—liking, following, and sharing. Monday - Friday 5pm - 2 a.m. EST About the role You'll be the first engineer on PaletAI and the technical owner of the core system that turns text prompts into playable games. You'll work across the stack, but your core strength is backend + AI systems (architecture, data, LLM integration). You're also fully capable of shipping production‑quality frontend code in React Native / React when needed—especially in the early months before the junior/front‑end‑leaning engineer joins. You'll work directly with the SF‑based founder and play a key role in decisions like: - How we dramatically improve game quality from "novel toy" to "actually fun"
- How we design remixing, credit systems, and interstitial ads
- How we support web‑playable links, Android, and a basic browser experience without exploding complexity
This is a hands‑on founding role: no management layers, no big‑company process—just you, the founder, and a lot of shipping. What you'll do Own and evolve the platform architecture - Design and maintain our backend (Python/FastAPI, MongoDB today; likely introducing Postgres for social/relational data over time).
- Shape how we move from "raw HTML/JS in a WebView" toward a more opinionated, safer PaletAI game protocol (e.g., JSON‑described games, sandboxed logic) when the time is right.
- Ensure the feed, social graph, and game loading stay fast as usage grows.
Lead AI game‑generation & quality - Own integration with Anthropic/OpenAI (and Azure OpenAI): prompt design, model selection, cost/latency tradeoffs, retries/fallbacks.
- Design and implement evaluation harnesses that automatically sanity‑check generated games (headless runs, basic fuzz tests, crash/soft‑lock detection) before they ever hit the feed.
- Work directly with the founder to iterate on system prompts and pipelines so the average generated game is genuinely fun, not just syntactically correct.
Ship features end‑to‑end (especially early on) In the first few months, you'll be the only engineer. You'll implement both backend and frontend for things like: - Remixing: letting users fork and tweak others' games without breaking them.
- Credit system: tracking free vs. paid prompt usage, "watch‑to‑earn" credits, and in‑app purchases.
- Interstitial ads & placements: integrating mobile ad SDKs and wiring up the logic/server‑side tracking.
- Web‑playable links: a lightweight web player so shared games can be played without installing the app.
- Android & basic web: bringing our React Native app to Android and shipping a minimal, solid browser experience.
Harden, secure, and scale - Implement proper indexing, query patterns, and background processing for game generation, analytics, and task tracking.
- Think hard about sandboxing and security for untrusted HTML/JS: CSP, sandboxed iframes/WebViews, sanitization strategies.
- Set up lightweight CI/CD, monitoring, and logging so we can ship fast without flying blind.
Help build the team & culture - Collaborate on the hiring process for the junior/front‑end‑leaning engineer and other future technical roles.
- Set engineering standards (code review norms, testing philosophy, observability) appropriate for a tiny, high‑velocity team.
Must‑have skills & experience Backend & architecture (your core specialty) - 7+ years of professional software engineering, including real ownership over a meaningful product or subsystem (ideally as primary or only backend/platform engineer).
- Strong Python experience with FastAPI (or very similar async frameworks): comfortable with async I/O, background tasks, and performance tuning.
- Solid database design experience for social‑style products (users, follows, likes, feeds), with:
- Hands‑on work with MongoDB (or another document store) — schema design, indexing, performance.
- Strong SQL fundamentals (Postgres or similar) and the ability to evaluate when to introduce relational data models and/or migrate specific workloads.
- Proven ability to design and evolve clean, versioned REST APIs that mobile and web clients consume efficiently.
Applied AI / LLM integration - Production experience integrating Anthropic/OpenAI/Azure OpenAI (or similar) into real systems—not just toy scripts.
- Comfortable designing prompts and multi‑step pipelines for structured outputs (JSON/code), handling hallucinations and errors gracefully.
- Familiar with cost and latency management: batching, caching, model selection (e.g., "small/dumb" for free tier, "smarter" for paid), and safe retries/fallback strategies.
Game/JS output literacy - Able to read and debug AI‑generated HTML/CSS/JavaScript for simple games (Canvas or DOM‑based):
- When a game glitches (e.g., physics feels off, object falls through floor, event loop locks), you can quickly understand why at the code level.
- You can then adjust prompts or constraints so the system produces better code next time, not just patch one output.
Frontend & web (competent enough to ship solo) - Production experience with React Native (TypeScript preferred): navigation, state management (Redux Toolkit / Zustand / similar), API integration, basic performance debugging.
- Comfortable with React for web and core web concepts: DOM, responsive layout, bundlers, basic SEO/metadata.
- Understanding of rendering untrusted HTML/JS securely:
- WebView/iframe sandboxing basics.
- Awareness of XSS, CSP, and how to minimize risk when running user‑generated code.
General - Excellent written and spoken English; comfortable collaborating daily with a US‑based founder.
- Comfortable with early‑stage chaos: vague specs, rapid iteration, lots of product/tech tradeoff decisions.
- Genuine interest in games (especially mobile / web / UGC) and social/creator products.
Nice to have - You definitely don't need all of these, but they're helpful:
- Experience on social, feed‑based, or creator‑economy products (e.g., content feeds, follower graphs, notifications, sharing/remix features).
- Experience with HTML5 game tech (Canvas, Phaser, Pixi, Three.js) or engines (Unity/Godot) — even from side projects.
- Prior work with ads & monetization in mobile apps (AdMob, AppLovin, Unity Ads, etc.).
- Experience setting up CI/CD, Docker‑based deployments, and monitoring/alerting on Azure/AWS/GCP.
- Exposure to content safety / moderation systems (filters, heuristics, basic abuse prevention).
