Co-Founder / Founding CTO

Technical 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.

ABOUT RALLY

Rally is building infrastructure for the live-events industry.

The platform connects the systems surrounding an event: organizers, talent agencies, middle buyers, venues, production partners, ticket buyers, payments, ticketing, transportation, documents, safety, settlement, CRM, analytics, and door operations.

We are initially focused on concerts originating through college and group demand, with the broader goal of building infrastructure that can support professional live events at scale.

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 peop