Co-Founder

You will be Graystone's technical co-founder, with two jobs: lead the software we build for clients, and turn SRE into a service we can sell. You'll write code most days, make the architecture calls, and share the business decisions with the founder.
This is a co-founder seat with equity, not a contract or a salaried job. It suits someone who wants ownership and is comfortable building before the revenue is steady.
What you'll do
Lead client development. Design and build business software for clients: web applications, APIs, databases and integrations between the systems they already use.
Scope and estimate. Turn a client's problem into a plan, a timeline and a price, and stand behind the quotes we send.
Assist in build the SRE offering. Define what we sell: monitoring and alerting, uptime targets, incident response, backups and recovery, release automation and cost control. Package it as a monthly retainer.
Run it for clients. Set up the tooling, write the runbooks, handle incidents and report on reliability each month.
Set our engineering standards. Version control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD and security practices that every project follows.
Keep our own systems healthy. Own hosting, security and monitoring for Graystone's site and product, and use them as the reference for what we offer clients.
Act as an owner. Join sales calls, help with pricing, and hire engineers or contractors when revenue supports it.
What I am looking for
Must have:
Five or more years building and shipping production software, including work you delivered for clients or business users.
Strong in at least one mainstream stack, such as C#/.NET, TypeScript/Node or Python, plus SQL and API design.
Hands-on operations experience: you have been on call, handled real incidents and written the postmortem.
Working knowledge of a major cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare), CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and monitoring and logging tools.
Comfort working directly with clients: listening, scoping, estimating and saying no when needed.
A builder's temperament. You finish things, you test them, and you don't shy away of ownership.
Good to have
Experience selling or delivering managed services, retainers or support contracts.
Setting SLOs and error budgets, or running an SRE or DevOps team.
Security and compliance work, such as SOC 2 or HIPAA.
Containers and Kubernetes.
Based in or near the Fox Valley or Chicagoland, or willing to meet in person from time to time.
What we offer
Equity: 40% of the company, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff.
Pay: [no salary until revenue supports it / a share of client project revenue / $X per month].
Commitment: [part-time to start, about X hours a week / full-time].
Location: [remote / hybrid in Geneva, IL].
Say: an equal voice in product, clients and hiring, and full ownership of the technical decisions.

Skills
Python, TypeScript, C#, .NET, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes

Work arrangement
Yes