Original job description
Hi there, I’m Helen Huang and I’m building a new way to measure someone’s character, values, and taste. In an era of increasingly more AI tools that uNlOcK eFfIcIeNcY - I’m making tools that augment our human-ness, and I’m looking for your help!
🍊 About The Role
You're a generalist engineer who can work across the stack - frontend, backend, infra, data, mobile
Toronto preferred, but open to fully remote work with periodic in person work sessions for the right person
PLEASE NOTE: we will work startup full time hours (7 days a week, so definitely not 40 hours, also not 100 hours, but realistically you’ll end up somewhere around the 60 range as a minimum)
it’s not actually about the hours… but if you’re someone who prefers to hold strict boundaries with work and shut the laptop at 6 (wtf?! 6?? not even 5?? haha) or if doing work on the weekend is blasphemous to you (very valid things for you to feel btw), this is not gonna be the right fit for either of us
At least 3+ years of experience, startup experience is a must working 0 - > 1
You've been the primary (or only) engineer at a startup with a small team (not a solo project, not a 50-person dev org). You've owned the full dev process without a dedicated PM, data scientist, or DevOps person handing you direction, though you've also shipped alongside other engineers and stakeholders who challenged your thinking. Side projects are cool, but we want to see that you've navigated real constraints with real teammates.
You use AI-assisted development daily. Whether it's Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, MCPs, etc, etc - you already use AI tools to move faster and you have opinions about when they help vs when they get in the way.
Genuinely full-stack: Currently we use: TypeScript, React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn, Convex, Clerk, PostHog, Cloudflare
Targeting $80k - $125k CAD + 1.0% - 2.5% Equity
while this cannot compare with more established companies (and will likely be way more work and stress and fun seeing as we are a pre-seed company), it is important for me to know that your needs are generally covered (not ramen salary 🍜) and that there is meaningful equity for your work (aka not like 0.1%)
🍎 The Big Vision
Trove is building the user-owned behavioral identity layer for the internet. This is infrastructure for people to be seen authentically - not through labels or accomplishments, but through revealed behavior.
Imagine a world if you could have x-ray vision for someone’s character. You could be celebrated for exactly who you are, hired for your traits that a resume can’t show. A world where the people you date and the friends you hang out with are trustworthy and genuine. How do we measure and quantify soft skills?
And in the future, as AI is embedded everywhere around us - what it cannot mimic is our character, our taste, our decision making, our actions. What can represent who we are at that point? What does a personal artifact of this future look like?
Those are the guiding principles of Trove.
🍈 More Details
This isn't a typical startup engineering role where you get handed tickets. You'll be building alongside me to figure out what Trove ultimately becomes!
Here's the situation so far:
In October 2025, I vibecoded what I'd call MVP 1.0 and shared it casually around (cold, no personal audience, etc, just Reddit and FB groups). From that experience we had 1,000 players, a 65% completion rate of a 2 minute experience, and close to 30% chose to start a new game. They said things like "woah I feel seen" and "wow this is much better than a Buzzfeed quiz." I then replicated this success and got 2000 WAU on another distribution campaign… 🤐
In Feb 2026, we launched a limited time Valentine's campaign (it’s done now but here’s an access link) that went really super well: 2,000+ users, 77% D3 retention unprompted, and four companies reached out about using our platform for recruiting purposes. Zero dollars spent on marketing.
As a founding engineer (first engineering hire!!) you’ll:
Own large chunks of the technical stack and ship end to end
We're a TypeScript shop: React + Vite on the frontend, Convex on the backend, Cloudflare for hosting. You'll work across all of it
Build new product features from idea → implementation → deployment → monitoring
Help evolve the architecture as we go from "scrappy thing that works" to "scrappy thing that works at scale”
Build out our external facing features and internal facing platforms
Help ship mobile eventually
Ship one-off marketing and customer acquisition campaigns
it’s gonna be fun - trust me 👀 you’re talking to a person who hosted a trash bag fashion show for 100 people on a whim
Think about what to actually do with behavioural data
The product generates rich signal. You don't need to be an ML researcher - you need to be curious enough to ask "what does this tell us?" and technical enough to build something with the answer.
Help build scoring systems, trait models, and recommendation logic that actually differentiate people (this is harder than it sounds - our V-Day experience taught us a lot about what doesn't work)
Explore ML/NLP approaches for things like: analyzing open-ended text responses, clustering behavioral patterns, generating personalized outputs
Be a product engineer, not just a code monkey 🐒
Propose technical approaches and push back when something won't work or could be simpler
Play through the product constantly - you're finding bugs, edge cases, and "this feels weird" moments before users do
Care about the user experience even though you're not the designer. A janky transition or a confusing flow bugs you
Work closely with me.
You’re the only technical hire at a small startup. That means you need to be someone who can own things independently and collaborate well when building together.
Build for what's next, not just what's now.
We have inbound B2B interest. You'll help think about what a platform/API looks like.
Our identity artifacts need to go places - shareable, embeddable, portable. You'll help figure out how.
Some feature work will be net new completely 0 → 1, other feature work will be iterative improvements
Ship things that have never been built before. There is no template for what we're making - you'll be inventing patterns, not following them.
Actually engage with users - you'll see their reactions to what you built, not filtered through three layers of PMs.
Shape what Trove as a company becomes - it's us figuring out together what makes people understand themselves better… and who else can help us get there.
