Co-Founder / Founding CTO

Rally is hiring a Technical Co-Founder / Founding CTO to take long-term ownership of the technology behind a new operating and distribution layer for live events.

Important: Rally is currently bootstrapped. This is an equity-based co-founder opportunity and does not include a guaranteed salary initially. We are looking for someone who wants meaningful ownership of the company and is prepared to build mission-critical infrastructure—not someone looking for a short-term freelance project.

Rally is being designed as a multi-sided platform with separate experiences for:

Event organizers and organizations
Talent agencies
Middle buyers and booking partners
Rally administrators and operators
Venues and production partners
Ticket buyers
Door and scanning teams
An extensive product foundation and initial codebase already exist. The technical co-founder will audit what has been built, determine what should be retained or rebuilt, establish the production architecture, and own the platform from launch through scale.

THE MOST IMPORTANT SYSTEM: TICKETING

One of the highest-priority responsibilities is building Rally's ticketing infrastructure into a system we can trust for real concerts.

Think about the engineering requirements behind a Ticketmaster-style onsale:

A major artist announces a show.

Thousands or tens of thousands of fans hit the event page at once.

Inventory cannot oversell.

Payments cannot be duplicated.

A customer cannot be charged without receiving the correct ticket.

Every ticket must have a unique, auditable ownership history.

Transfers and resales must invalidate previous credentials.

QR codes must validate securely.

Tens of thousands of attendees may arrive within a narrow entry window.

Venue connectivity may become slow or disappear entirely.

Scanners still need to work.

Capacity counts still need to remain accurate.

If one service fails, the entire event cannot fail with it.

We need an engineer who understands that this is distributed systems + payments + inventory + identity + access control + real-world operations.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Ticketing & Inventory
High-concurrency ticket onsales
Event inventory and hard capacity enforcement
Reserved and general-admission inventory
Organization and promoter ticket allocations
Inventory holds and expiration
Atomic inventory reservation
Queueing / waiting-room architecture when required
Checkout concurrency and race-condition prevention
Idempotent order creation
Ticket issuance
Cancellations and refunds
Ticket transfers
Verified resale infrastructure
Ownership history
Seller and promoter attribution
VIP and backstage credentials
Fraud and abuse prevention
Complete ticket audit trails
Payments & Financial Infrastructure
Stripe payment architecture
Stripe Connect
Payment intents
Webhooks
Idempotency
Payment retries and failure recovery
Refunds
Disputes and chargebacks
Platform fees
Promoter and organization revenue attribution
Financial ledgers
Reconciliation
Settlement reporting
KYC-related platform workflows
Prevention of double charges and inconsistent payment states
Every dollar moving through Rally should be traceable from the customer transaction through settlement.

QR Codes & Venue Access
Build a scanning system capable of operating at real concert scale.

This includes:

Secure unique ticket credentials
Rotating or otherwise screenshot-resistant QR codes where appropriate
One-time ticket validation
Immediate duplicate-use detection
Transfer invalidation
VIP/backstage permissions
Wrong-event detection
Scanner device authorization
Real-time check-in state
Entry and exit tracking
Live venue capacity
Offline and degraded-connectivity scanning
Local scanner synchronization
Conflict resolution when connectivity returns
Manual attendee lookup and recovery workflows
Lost-phone and dead-phone procedures
Complete access audit logs
The system must be designed around the reality that cellular service inside a packed venue can be unreliable.

Reliability & Scale
Rally cannot discover whether its ticketing architecture works during the first major concert.

You will own:

Load testing
Stress testing
Concurrency testing
Payment failure simulations
Database failure simulations
Scanner failure simulations
Network-loss simulations
Queue testing
Rate limiting
Caching
CDN architecture
Database scaling
Backups
Disaster recovery
Monitoring
Alerting
Observability
Incident response
Rollback procedures
Security reviews
Production runbooks
Before Rally handles a 10,000-, 20,000-, or 50,000-person event, we should have already simulated conditions significantly worse than the expected event.

THE BROADER RALLY PLATFORM
Ticketing is only one part of the system.

The technical co-founder will also lead development of Rally's broader infrastructure.

Agency Platform
A workspace for talent agencies and large artist rosters, including:

Artist and roster management
Calendar and routing intelligence
Geographic visualization of artist movement
Schedule gaps
Demand by market
Offer and opportunity tracking
CRM
Documents and institutional knowledge
Search and AI-assisted analysis
Feasibility analysis across artist, market, venue, timing, routing, and budget
The long-term goal is for firms to be able to ingest messy institutional information—CRM records, spreadsheets, calendars, documents, presentations, historical deals, and other internal data—and have Rally organize that information into a usable operating system.

Middle Buyer / Booking Platform
Artist directory
Availability
Pricing ranges
Offers
Holds
Booking workflow
Event pipeline
Routing
Contracts
Communication history
Settlement
CRM and institutional memory
Organizer Platform
Organizations, promoters, companies, fraternities, sororities, and other groups can:

Plan events
Pool budgets with co-hosts
Select artists
Evaluate feasibility
Manage venues
Coordinate production
Handle transportation
Manage insurance and compliance
Manage ticket allocations
Track sales
Manage attendees
Store contracts and event documents
Operate the event through settlement
Rally Admin
A completely separate internal operating environment for Rally.

This includes:

Event oversight
Booking activity
Ticketing
Revenue
Payments
Settlements
Organizations
Agencies
Artists
Venues
Production
Insurance
Contracts
User management
Permissions
System health
Error logs
Fraud monitoring
Scanner status
Incident management
Data & AI
Rally should eventually become an intelligence layer over live events.

That includes:

Unified event data
Artist demand
Market demand
Routing intelligence
Historical event performance
Ticket conversion
Sell-through
Pricing intelligence
Capacity forecasting
Fraud detection
Artist-event matching
Operational risk signals
Natural-language search across Rally data
"Ask Rally" functionality for feasibility and operational questions
SECURITY & DATA ARCHITECTURE
Rally will hold sensitive commercial, customer, ticketing, payment, and potentially agency information.

You will own architecture around:

Multi-tenant data isolation
Role-based access control
Authentication
Authorization
Encryption
Secrets management
Audit logs
Least-privilege access
Secure file storage
Data retention
Administrative access
Environment separation
Dependency security
Vulnerability management
Backup and recovery
Agency data must not leak between agencies. Organization data must not leak between organizations. Administrative systems must not accidentally become publicly accessible.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We care more about engineering judgment and ownership than years on a résumé.

Strong candidates should have experience with several of the following:

TypeScript
React
Next.js
Node.js
PostgreSQL
Distributed systems
High-concurrency applications
Transactional database design
Stripe or comparable payment infrastructure
Webhooks and idempotency
Queueing systems
Caching
Secure authentication and authorization
Multi-tenant SaaS architecture
Real-time systems
Observability
Cloud infrastructure
Automated testing
CI/CD
You should understand concepts such as:

Race conditions
Atomic transactions
Idempotency
Event-driven architecture
Exactly-once vs. at-least-once processing
Database locking
Inventory consistency
Failure recovery
Horizontal scaling
Rate limiting
Graceful degradation
Distributed state synchronization
ESPECIALLY VALUABLE EXPERIENCE
We would be particularly interested in someone who has worked on:

Ticketing platforms
High-volume e-commerce
Fintech
Marketplaces
Payments infrastructure
Stadium or venue technology
Travel booking
Reservations
Flash-sale systems
Identity/access systems
Offline-first applications
High-traffic consumer platforms
Experience with systems where money, limited inventory, and high concurrency collide is particularly valuable.

WHO THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR
This is not a conventional frontend engineering job.

It is not primarily about building dashboards or making UI changes.

It is not a role where a founder hands you individual tickets and you implement them.

We need someone who can look at a requirement like:

> "40,000 people may attempt to purchase tickets, and thousands may arrive at the venue simultaneously"

and independently determine the architecture, failure modes, tests, monitoring, operational procedures, and safeguards required before saying the system is ready.

You should be willing to say "we are not ready to launch this yet" when the engineering evidence does not support it.

WORKING RELATIONSHIP
Caroline, Rally's founder, leads product vision, customer development, sales, partnerships, fundraising, and event operations.

The technical co-founder will own:

Engineering
Architecture
Infrastructure
Security
Reliability
Technical hiring
Engineering standards
Production readiness
Both founders will collaborate closely on product strategy and major company decisions.

This person should eventually be capable of building and leading Rally's engineering organization.

COMPENSATION & PATH TO CTO
Rally is currently bootstrapped and cannot offer a traditional full-time CTO salary today. We want to be transparent about that upfront.

Initially, we expect to work with the right technical leader on a part-time, project, milestone, or retainer basis focused on auditing and hardening the existing platform for production use. Compensation at this stage will reflect the scope of work and Rally's current resources.

If the relationship is successful, the intention is for this person to grow into Rally's full-time technical leader as the company generates revenue or raises capital. A long-term package would include meaningful equity and competitive cash compensation appropriate to the person's responsibilities and commitment.

We are open to discussing a true technical co-founder structure with an exceptional candidate, but equity, vesting, cash compensation, and title will be determined based on actual commitment and the long-term relationship.

THE STANDARD
We are not looking for someone who can make Rally appear production-ready.

We are looking for someone who can prove that it is production-ready.

For ticketing in particular, that means we should be able to demonstrate through architecture reviews, automated testing, load testing, failure testing, monitoring, and real-world operational procedures that Rally can safely handle the event before real customers depend on it.

If building infrastructure that has to work when tens of thousands of people show up at once sounds exciting rather than intimidating, we want to talk.