Founding Engineer / Technical Lead (Laravel, SaaS & AI)

## About the role We are on a mission to build one of the largest racket sports communities and booking platform in the world. We have successfully validated our MVP with hundreds of active tennis club clients over the past two months. Racster was born out of 5 years of hands-on experience running our own tennis club. We experienced the limitations of existing market solutions firsthand and decided to build the platform that actually solves the real-world challenges faced by clubs and players. Now, we are moving away from an external development agency to build a dedicated internal core team. We need a founding engineer to join us at an early stage—not just to write code, but to help shape architecture, product decisions, and the future direction of the platform. Our long-term goal is to become the leading booking and community platform for racket sports clubs worldwide. ## Who We Are Looking For We are looking for a rare breed. You are a business-minded systems architect, not just a task executor. You measure success by the elegance, simplicity, and scalability of your solutions, and you naturally look for ways to automate complex workflows to deliver a seamless user experience. AI is a core part of your development workflow, and you use it extensively to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and reduce repetitive work. You challenge assumptions, improve weak processes, identify risks early, and care about the long-term success of the product. You care about creating the best product, not writing the most code. You actively simplify complexity and challenge solutions that create unnecessary maintenance or poor user experiences. You are comfortable working with uncertainty, making decisions, moving quickly, and wearing multiple hats when necessary. ## Key Requirements - Laravel: Our core ecosystem is built on Laravel. You must know it inside out. - Systems Architecture: You design systems that remain simple, scalable, maintainable, and cost-efficient. - SaaS and Booking Experience: Hands-on experience building SaaS platforms, marketplaces, or high-volume transaction apps. - UX and Automation Mindset: You proactively simplify logic and optimize user flows to keep software intuitive. - Vision and Long-Term Commitment: You want more than just an hourly income. You are excited to accept an optimized cash rate in exchange for a meaningful equity stake, contributing to an asset you help build. Terms and structure (including performance-based milestones) will be discussed openly with the selected candidate. - High Moral Standards and Professionalism: We value honesty, reliability, professionalism, respect, accountability, and keeping commitments. We expect team members to remain cons