Founding CTO (Co-founder Earn-in Track)

Company Description

Game Caster is the living marketing plan that turns the act of making a game into the act of marketing it.

We're a marketing platform for game studios — the studios most likely to put a heart-and-soul project on Steam and struggle to get their voices heard in a crowded market. Our pitch: Built with genre and sub-genre level specificity, we build a marketing plan that turns your game development journey into regular marketing content.

We just finished a beta with 20 studios. We have a paying lighthouse customer running the full Plan → Style → Feed loop end-to-end on an open world/survival/crafting title. The product works. The next chapter is taking it from 20 studios to hundreds — and the engineering side of that chapter is yours to own.

Role Description

This is a full-time remote (UK preferred but open to all locations) role for a Founding CTO on a co-founder earn-in track. As the Founding CTO, you will lead the end-to-end software development process, define technical architecture, and oversee IT strategy. You will collaborate closely with the founding team to develop innovative products that meet user needs, manage technical complexities, and co-develop the company’s long-term technological vision with the CEO.

This is an opportunity if you are passionate about gaming & tech and want to start a movement that will create a good change in how games are marketed and get discovered.

What you'll do exactly (Year 1)

-By month 3, you'll have taken the wheel: deploys, on-call, error budgets, pricing tiers battle-tested, PostHog A/B experiments running on every freemium gate.

-By month 8, you'll have matured the style pipeline (today: reference-conditioned generation; next: per-game LoRA / fine-tuning), evolved The Feed from V0 to proactive (audio transcripts, GDD diffs, automatic plan-slot mapping), and hired your first engineer.

-By month 12, you'll have a functioning team, the platform handling 10x current load, and a real seat at the strategy table — at which point your title becomes Co-founder & CTO and your final equity grant lands.

The stack you'll inherit

• Next.js 16 + TypeScript + Prisma + PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS (EC2 / S3 / Route53)
• Vertex AI / Anthropic Claude / Google Gemini for generation
• Stripe wired from Day 0, with 3-tier pricing and a credit economy
• PostHog (EU Cloud) for events + feature flags + A/B
• NextAuth v5 + Google OAuth

V2 is being built and tested. Your focus will be to enhance the build and turn into a scalable system.

Who you are

• 6+ years shipping production backends in TypeScript/Node.js or Python (we're stack-flexible — V2 is TypeScript)
• Production experience on both AWS and GCP — this is non-negotiable. V2 runs on AWS, Vertex AI generation calls and a few legacy integrations live on GCP. We need fluency in both clouds.
• React + Next.js (App Router) comfortable on the frontend
• Hands-on with LLM APIs in production — multimodal prompting, token economics, retry strategy. Strong bonus: diffusion / LoRA / image-gen experience.
• Stripe + PostHog production experience — freemium-gate tuning is half the job
• Either an active gamer or someone who has shipped at a games company. This is a hard requirement. Marketing a survival game is not the same as marketing a horror game, and you need to feel that in your bones to build for it.
• Resilience for ambiguity, transparent communication, and the appetite to make decisions with 60% of the information

The offer

• Base salary: £60–80K depending on experience and cash-vs-equity preference. The wider band is intentional — £60K aligns with our F&F runway; £80K is the top for an exceptional gaming + AI-stack candidate.
• Equity: 10–12% across three milestone-based grants over Year 1, then vesting monthly over 4 years per grant.
• Title: Founding CTO from day one. Promoted to Co-founder & CTO at month 12 alongside the final equity grant — title and equity earn in together.
• Salary review: Targeted to £100–120K at seed-round close.
• Location: Remote, UK/EU timezone, with occasional in-person time in London.

Skip if

• "I'd rip it all out and start over." V2 is live with a paying customer; we improve incrementally.
• You don't play games and have never worked in games. Hard skip.
• You want a 5-person team before you've seen the codebase.
• You're optimising for cash compensation more than upside.

How to apply

Email cangunaslan@game-caster with:

1. A summary of your experience in Gaming & AI
2. A short note on which game/genre you'd love to build Game Caster's experience for next, and why
3. Links to anything you've shipped — production AI/SaaS, a games-industry project, an open-source tool, anything that shows your thinking
4. And last but not least, your why (why you want to join, why do you want to achieve what you want to achieve)

I read every application personally. If your note resonates, you'll hear from me within 5 days.

— Can Gunaslan, Founder & CEO, Game Caster