Founding Engineer / Technical Lead, US — mond, Palo Alto

The one-paragraph pitch

AI made answers cheap. Human judgment is becoming scarce.

mond is the social inbox where audience questions become public creator content. Fans don’t just consume a creator’s posts — they ask the questions that pull out the creator’s judgment, stories, taste, and ideas. On mond, fans write candidly to specific creators; creators answer in their own voice and earn from it. Private curiosity becomes public content: candid questions, accountable answers.

This already works. Millions of people use mond in Japan, and 12M+ questions and answers have been exchanged — growing ~2.9× year over year, with 99%+ addressed to a specific person, not a generic topic. Creators monetize directly through paid questions, memberships, tips, and Paid Answers.

Japan was the first market — the proof. The ambition is not “expand beyond Japan.” It’s to take a model that already works and build it for a global audience, from Palo Alto. This is not a localization role. The US team defines the global product and architecture, working with Tokyo as one team. You’ll own the technical design and implementation of the US/global platform, lead the re-architecture for multi-locale and multi-currency scale, and help launch mond in the US. As the US team scales, this role can grow into CTO / Head of Engineering.

About me

I’m Yosuke, CEO of mond, Inc. and founder/CEO of Howtelevision, the profitable public company backing mond. I took Howtelevision public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, built mond from zero to millions of users, and moved from Tokyo to Palo Alto with my family to build the global company in person, from here. I read every serious application myself.

Why this isn’t a typical startup bet

Proven demand, real usage. Millions use the product in Japan, 12M+ Q&As exchanged, already monetizing through paid questions, memberships, tips, and Paid Answers.

Default-alive, scaling by choice. Backed by a profitable, publicly traded Japanese company (Howtelevision, Tokyo Stock Exchange). We’re expanding because we want to, not because a runway clock is forcing us.

Real startup upside. mond, Inc. is an independent Delaware C-corp. Your equity is in mond, Inc. itself — real ownership in the company you’re building. The Japan business is the proof of the model: known retention, known monetization, known unit economics. You’re not betting on whether the product works — you’re betting on how large it gets when it’s global. Under NDA, before the working session, I’ll be transparent about the equity plan — the intended ownership range, how and when grants get formalized, and the Japan numbers behind the model — so you can evaluate it early.

A contrarian thesis with a why-now. As generic AI answers become free, the scarce thing is a specific person’s answer — their story, judgment, taste, context, and accountability. Not “ask the internet.” Ask the person whose answer actually matters. Whether that becomes a global default — the way people reach a specific person’s judgment at scale — is still an open question, and the bet you’d be here to help make.

A real architecture problem, not a blank page. Most founding roles offer either a greenfield with no users or a legacy system with no mandate. This is the rare third case: real users, real data, real payments, and a mandate to rebuild the global platform.

How we build: a deliberately tiny, AI-native team

We are not trying to hire a big team. We’re trying to hire a few exceptional engineers and give them enormous leverage. The bet is that a few exceptional engineers, using AI well, can out-build a much larger conventional team.

That means AI is in the critical path of how we work — codegen, review, agents, internal tooling — but judgment is never outsourced to it. We want people who use AI to go faster on the things that are mechanical and stay slow and deliberate on the things that are load-bearing: architecture, correctness, money, trust. If “the best engineers are now the ones who wield AI best” sounds right to you, this is built for you.

What you’ll do

You’ll build and own mond’s US/global platform. The existing service is live in Japan with real users, real data, and a real payments ledger; your job is to design and build the global platform that lets mond scale to a global audience. You’ll work closely with the CEO in Palo Alto and the Tokyo Tech Lead — one global engineering team, with the US side taking clear ownership of the global platform and re-architecture.

How US and Tokyo work together

We say “one team,” and we mean it — but one team still needs clear decision rights. So they’re explicit:

• The US (you) owns the global platform and architecture: the multi-locale/multi-currency backbone, the global API and data model, and the re-architecture roadmap. On those, you hold the pen.
• Tokyo owns the existing Japan product and the system that serves it today, and is the deep source of truth on how the current product actually behaves with real users and real money.
• Per-market buildout is shared. You design the global backbone; market-specific buildout is divided with Tokyo case by case.
• The CEO breaks ties. I’m in Palo Alto, in the room with you, and when US and Tokyo genuinely disagree on direction, I decide quickly so nothing stalls across timezones.

You won’t be a US satellite asking Tokyo for permission, and you won’t be overriding the team that built the proven product. You own the global platform we’re building; Tokyo owns the proven Japan product and the system serving it today — one team, raising the bar together.

What you’ll own from day one

1. US/global platform architecture. Lead the technical design and implementation of the platform that powers mond outside Japan: multi-locale and multi-currency, global API and data-model design, reliability for viral traffic (regional traffic can jump an order of magnitude in hours), trust & safety as a core layer, and payments / points / monetization. You design the global backbone; per-market buildout is shared with Tokyo.

2. Re-architecture of a live product. mond is one live app today. Audit current and anticipated bottlenecks, decide what stays and what changes, build the migration path to the next-generation system, and make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and long-term architecture — shaped together with the CEO and Tokyo Tech Lead.

3. Creator monetization and payments correctness. Extend the production ledger into a cross-market system: dual-market Stripe platform accounts, Connect payouts, per-transaction double-entry records, multi-currency, and a points / virtual-currency economy. This is the economic layer of the creator platform.

4. Product surfaces, not just infrastructure. Build the product itself: creator inbox, question intake and answer flow, public answer pages, paid-answer mechanics, monetization flows, moderation surfaces, and early US growth loops. You make product calls without a PM or a perfect spec — the CEO will be in user interviews alongside you.

5. Trust & safety as product. mond only works if people can be candid without the product becoming toxic. Design the safety layer — moderation pipeline, AI-assisted tooling, creator controls, abuse prevention, reporting and escalation — that keeps candid, unattributed questions safe from harassment while preserving what makes them honest.

6. Minimum analytics foundation. Define the minimum measurement needed for fast iteration, then decide what to build directly, what to keep simple, and what to delegate to the appropriate Tokyo-side engineers. The priority is the end-user product and the global architecture.

Growth path

This role starts as Founding Engineer / Technical Lead, US, and can grow into CTO / Head of Engineering as the US team scales — earned through building: architecture quality, product judgment, recruiting pull, cross-region trust, and aligning people around the right technical direction.

Current stack

• Web: Next.js, TypeScript
• Mobile: React Native + Expo
• Backend: Node.js, Prisma
• API: Hasura GraphQL
• Database: Postgres on Cloud SQL
• Infrastructure: GCP, Terraform
• Repo: TypeScript monorepo

You’ll decide what stays, what changes, and what becomes the global platform.

Who we’re looking for

Three things are required. Nothing else is.

1. You’ve built or rebuilt something real — shipped 0→1 and reached PMF, or owned and re-architected a live production system, as a founder, founding engineer, technical lead, or the person who launched or rebuilt something real users and real money depended on.
2. You’re strong across product and engineering — you design systems, write code, make product calls, and ship without a perfect spec. Strong full-stack TypeScript (React, Next.js, Node, cloud) is a strong plus; close equivalents are welcome if the judgment is there.
3. You operate across regions in English — write clearly, speak directly, and build alignment across timezones.

Strong signals — one matters more than checking every box:

• You’ve built payment, ledger, marketplace, or virtual-currency systems — anything where correctness meant money
• You’ve built creator-economy, consumer-social, messaging, Q&A, community, or audience-engagement products
• You’ve re-architected a live production system while users kept using it
• You’ve used AI agents to move faster as an engineer, without outsourcing judgment to them
• You care about trust & safety as part of product design
• You want to eventually lead engineers, but you still want to build