About Coverstar
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.
The Role
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.
What You'll Do
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
What We're Looking For
Backend & Cloud Expertise
- 6+ 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
Why Join Coverstar?
- 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
