Technical Co-Founder or Founding Full-Stack Partner — Price Harvest

## About the role Price Harvest is an early-stage grocery price comparison platform that helps shoppers compare prices across nearby stores, manage grocery lists, and build smarter shopping plans. This is not just an idea-stage project. I've already built a substantial working product with a real backend, database, scraping and admin tools, product verification workflows, product matching logic, and a consumer-facing comparison experience. I'm primarily looking for a technical co-founder or founding full-stack partner who wants meaningful ownership in an already-built product and can help bring it to a polished beta and production launch. This is not a traditional salaried employee role at this stage. I have a limited budget available for an initial paid trial sprint, contractor-style milestone, or short-term project if that is the best way to establish fit, but the main opportunity is a long-term founding-level relationship with equity and ownership upside. I'm also open to discussing adjacent arrangements depending on fit, including a founding engineer relationship, part-time technical collaborator role, or paid milestone-based work. The important thing is finding someone strong, practical, and aligned with the product. ## The current stack The current stack includes Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, React, Docker, Redis/RQ, Selenium-based scraping, product matching and verification logic, and admin tooling for scraping and catalog management. ## Major early focus areas A major early focus will be getting the product search and comparison experience working really well. The app needs to handle messy, inconsistent grocery catalog data and still return useful, trustworthy results that feel simple to shoppers. That includes improving search relevance, ranking, filtering, product grouping, item matching, and the way results are presented to users. A second major focus is UX. I want Price Harvest to feel polished, fast, and intuitive — closer to a modern consumer shopping product than an internal database tool. The right person should care about how real users search, compare, select stores, manage lists, and decide what to buy. That said, this is still an early-stage product, so the role is not limited to search and UX. There is a lot of important work between where the app is now and a strong beta/production release. I'm looking for someone who can help across the product and engineering stack, make practical tradeoffs, and take ownership of important parts of the system. ## Role description This is a big-hat role with meaningful potential upside. The right person should be comfortable helping across product, engineering, architecture, UX, data, launch planning, and technical decision-making. At the same time, this would not be a solo rescue mission. I will be working closely alongside this person, staying deeply involved in the app, helping execute wherever I can, and continuing to carry the product vision forward. I'm not looking for someone to simply take orders, and I'm also not looking to hand everything off. I'm looking for a true partner or close collaborator. I can contribute heavily on product direction, user flows, testing, research, partner conversations, business development, and parts of the technical work where deep specialization is not required. For deeper technical areas — such as DevOps, infrastructure, scaling, security, architecture, search quality, and production readiness — I'm looking for someone with stronger experience or the willingness to figure things out with me. I'm happy to learn, take direction, follow good technical judgment, and divide responsibilities based on who is best suited for each area. The goal is to operate as a small, serious team: practical, honest, fast-moving, and focused on getting Price Harvest to beta, then production, then real users and partners. ## The ideal person The ideal person is comfortable working across the stack and can help with some combination of: - Improving product search relevance, ranking, filtering, and discovery across inconsistent grocery catalogs - Improving the comparison experience so users can quickly understand the best options across nearby stores - Improving the React frontend and overall UX so the product feels polished, fast, and intuitive - Hardening the Flask/PostgreSQL backend - Improving scraping reliability and product data pipelines - Optimizing product matching, normalization, and verification workflows - Improving database performance, indexes, query patterns, and data quality - Helping define the path from current working product to beta launch - Cleaning up rough edges in the existing codebase where needed - Improving onboarding, account flows, saved lists, carts, store selection, and shopper-facing flows - Helping with deployment, Docker, server setup, monitoring, logging, and production readiness - Thinking through security, reliability, backups, error handling, and operational safeguards - Making practical architecture decisions without overengineering ## Helpful experience - Python / Flask - PostgreSQL / SQLAlchemy - React / JavaScript - Docker / deployment / DevOps - Redis/RQ or background job systems - Web scraping / Selenium / data pipelines - Search relevance, product matching, marketplace-style applications, or catalog data - Consumer UX, ecommerce, shopping, local marketplace, or comparison tools - Startup or indie product experience ## What we're looking for I'm especially interested in someone who is self-directed, pragmatic, security-conscious, and able to balance speed with maintainable code. I have a clear vision and a lot of work already completed, but I'm also flexible and open to better ways of doing things. I'd love to find someone who brings strong technical judgment, takes ownership, and is comfortable saying, "there's a better way to do this."