Coverstar is the safe and gamified social app. Our mission is to create a better world through positivity and play.
Coverstar is the safe and gamified social app. Our mission is to create a better world through positivity and play.
Product: COPPA-compliant mobile social app for ~ages 9–16 with short-form video, avatars, and livestreaming (no DMs)
Safety: AI-assisted plus human moderation; vetted creators and no private messaging
Location & founding: Headquartered in Berkeley, California; founded 2017 (legal name Norae Inc.)
Investors: Reported backers include A16Z GAMES (Speedrun), Draper Associates, CoreNest Capital
Unsafe or unsupervised mainstream short-form social platforms for children and teens.
2017
Social Networking Platforms
Listed as an early funding event on company profiles (date reported on Crunchbase)
Listed as a Seed round on company profiles (date reported on Crunchbase)
Listed as a Seed round on company profiles with CoreNest Capital named among recent investors
“Backed by institutional investors including A16Z GAMES (Speedrun), Draper Associates, and CoreNest Capital”
| Company |
|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Coverstar is building the first safe, creative, AI-native social platform for Gen Alpha. We’ve built a COPPA-compliant community where kids can create, collaborate, and grow safely.
We’re backed by top investors like a16z, moving fast, and hiring a mission-aligned **Engineering Lead** to help us power the next generation of personalized content and community.
We're looking for an allrounder, someone who can serve as the right hand of the CTO. You're senior enough to engage in architectural design discussions and make meaningful technical decisions, but you also thrive when rolling up your sleeves and diving into the details of the codebase. This role sits at the intersection of technical leadership and hands-on engineering, with significant ownership over code quality, project execution, and engineering processes.
You'll work side-by-side with the CTO in our Zurich office, helping to scale our platform, mentor the team, and ship features that directly impact our users.
**Technical Leadership & Code Quality**
Lead code reviews across the engineering team, ensuring high standards for quality, security, and maintainability
Establish and evolve coding standards, best practices, and architectural patterns
Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance on complex implementation challenges
**Project Management & Delivery**
Drive engineering projects from planning through delivery, coordinating across team members and stakeholders
Break down complex initiatives into actionable milestones and keep work on track
Identify risks early and proactively communicate status and blockers
**Process Improvement**
Continuously evaluate and improve our development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and team processes
Leverage AI tools to accelerate development cycles and automate repetitive tasks
Build a culture of iteration, measurement, and continuous improvement
**AI/ML Infrastructure Support**
Partner with AI/ML engineers to build and scale model training and inference pipelines
Design and maintain data pipelines for preprocessing, labeling automation, and model integration
Optimize compute and storage architecture for efficient training and deployment
**Infrastructure Management**
Drive proactive capacity planning and long-term infrastructure improvements
Ensure reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across our AWS environment
**Backend & Cloud Expertise**
5+ years of hands-on backend development experience, with deep proficiency in AWS services (EC2, Lambda, S3, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, and more)
Strong command of Node.js and Python for production systems; ideally familiarity with C/C++ or Rust for performance-critical components
Expert-level SQL skills with experience in both relational databases (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL solutions (DynamoDB, Redis), including performance optimization and scaling strategies
**AI/ML Experience**
2+ years of hands-on ML/AI experience, ideally in computer vision (image/video classification, object detection) and transformer architectures
Familiarity with LLMs, vLLMs, multimodal ML systems; bonus points for fine-tuning experience
Comfortable building and maintaining ML pipelines for training, evaluation, and production deployment
**Full-Stack Capability**
Experience building web and app based frontends, you can prototype a UI when needed and collaborate effectively with frontend engineers
Proficiency with modern development tools, including Claude Code and AI-assisted coding workflows
**Mindset & Working Style**
Genuinely curious about how systems work under the hood—you dig into problems until you understand them
Comfortable context-switching between strategic discussions and tactical implementation
Thrive in fast-moving environments where ownership, autonomy, and impact are the norm
**Mission that matters:** Help build a platform that genuinely protects kids while empowering their creativity
**High ownership:** Shape not just the product but also our engineering culture and processes
**Small, elite team:** Work as part of a "special forces" engineering group where every contribution is visible and valued
**Direct CTO collaboration:** Learn and grow while working closely with technical leadership
**Zurich office:** Beautiful location, great work environment, and the chance to build something meaningful