Founding Engineer - Volunteer

About Arou

Over the last six months, Arou has grown into a fast-growing community and a new way for adults to make real friends. We’re now turning that into a product.

Arou places you straight into a small group chat with three people around you - same age, location and similar interests. It’s an instant friendship group that helps people go from zero to talking, quickly. We then give you the tools to actually keep those friendships going, not just start them.

Think WhatsApp meets Tinder BFF (minus the swiping), built for people who want depth, not endless surface-level connections.

So far, everything has grown organically. We now have over 1,500 community members, and 1,200+ TikTok followers, all through word of mouth. We’ve been deliberately testing different audiences and channels - including a 500-person WhatsApp community - to understand what drives genuine connection and sustainable growth before launch. We know our customers.

The Role

We’re building our founding team and looking for a thoughtful, ambitious engineer who wants to ship fast, learn relentlessly, and help shape the future of how people make friends.

Who You Are

• You have a drive to build products that genuinely improve people’s lives.
• You care deeply about community and connection.
• You’re product-minded and commercial - you want to build something people love and that works as a business.
• You have a strong bar for quality, but you're fast - you know when to ship and iterate.
• You’re pragmatic, and curious
• You’ve got experience as a software engineer (we’re using React Native/Firebase for our mvp, but we value mindset over specific stack)
• You’re calm under pressure, motivated by purpose, and enjoy collaborating with passionate, driven people.

Commitment & Equity

This is an equity-only role. Everyone on the founding team currently has full-time roles, so this is treated as a passion project - we work evenings or weekends (when we can), with weekly syncs to stay aligned and move fast.

You’ll have full ownership from day one, a real voice in product and technical decisions, and the opportunity to shape something that will impact millions.

You should be excited about building something of your own.

Why Join

• You’ll help build a product that tackles one of the biggest modern challenges: loneliness .
• You’ll join at Day 1 , right as we launch our MVP - this has the potential to change so many lives
• You’ll work alongside founders who’ve built at some of the most exciting, fast-growing startups across Product, Design, and Operations.
• You’ll be part of a small, close-knit founding team with ambition, heart, and a bias for action.

If this sounds exciting, drop us a note at hello@arou.app or share your CV - we’ll grab a virtual coffee to chat.