Chief Technology Officer

Today, creators generate billions of views across platforms like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram, but the data behind their performance remains fragmented. Creators lack a unified way to understand their value, measure their growth, and make informed decisions about their careers.
Sparq is building the intelligence layer for the creator economy that changes that.
Backed by an established media ecosystem with over 250 million cumulative views, we’re looking for a Founding CTO to help turn that vision into a scalable technology platform.
About the Role
We’re seeking a highly technical, hands-on Founding CTO to lead the architecture, development, and long-term technical strategy of Sparq. This is a true 0-to-1 opportunity. You’ll work directly with the founding team to build our core platform, establish the technical foundation for our creator intelligence engine, and help shape the product as we scale. We’re looking for a builder first and a technical leader second. You should be comfortable writing production code, making architectural decisions independently, and taking ownership of the entire technical stack. As the company grows, you’ll have the opportunity to build and lead the engineering organization.
What You’ll Do
Own the technical architecture and end-to-end development of the Sparq platform.
Build and maintain scalable systems for ingesting, normalizing, and analyzing data from multiple social media platforms.
Lead development of our proprietary creator scoring system, analytics infrastructure, and recommendation engine.
Design and implement secure authentication, OAuth integrations, and third-party API connections.
Develop scalable backend services, databases, and data processing pipelines.
Integrate AI/LLM capabilities to deliver personalized creator insights and recommendations.
Collaborate closely with product and design to translate requirements into production-ready features.
Establish engineering best practices around security, performance, testing, and infrastructure.
Make critical technical decisions around architecture, infrastructure, and scalability.
Help recruit, mentor, and eventually lead a high-performing engineering team.
What We’re Looking For
Required Qualifications
Proven experience architecting, building, and launching production software
Strong proficiency in React, Next.js, and TypeScript
Deep experience with backend development and database architecture, ideally Node.js and PostgreSQL
Experience designing and building scalable, data-intensive SaaS applications
Strong understanding of REST APIs, OAuth, webhooks, rate limits, and third-party integrations
Experience building data ingestion pipelines and systems that process and update large volumes of information
Experience deploying and maintaining production applications using modern cloud infrastructure.
Ability to independently take a product from concept to launch
Strong product instincts and the ability to balance technical decisions with business priorities
Nice to Have
Experience working with YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Meta/Instagram, or other social platform APIs
Background in creator technology, social analytics, marketing technology, or data intelligence platforms
Experience building scoring models, ranking systems, or recommendation engines
Familiarity with LLM integrations, AI-powered analytics, or machine learning infrastructure
Previous experience as a founding engineer, technical cofounder, or early engineering hire at a startup
Experience scaling engineering teams and infrastructure following an initial product launch
How to Apply
Email ryan@gosparq.co with your resume or LinkedIn profile and a few sentences about the most technically complex product or system you’ve architected and built end-to-end.
Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

Work arrangement
Yes