Founding Engineer (CTO Track) — Airventory
Hybrid · Central London · Full-time
About Airventory
Airventory is a fashion supply chain platform on a mission to fix one of retail’s most persistent problems: unsold inventory. We connect DTC apparel brands to premium garments and top‑tier factories through a single platform, so our customers can launch, test, and scale their basics without holding stock. They only pay after they’ve made a sale. An obsession with designer‑grade quality separates us from the rest of the POD industry and makes this model a reality for the $285 billion basic garment market.
For more complex garments, we’re building the next layer: an AI‑enabled marketplace that matches brands to vetted factories, assists with tech pack construction, and handles end‑to‑end DTC logistics in one place. The $767 billion global apparel manufacturing industry has had almost no real technology innovation for B2B ordering in decades. We intend to change that.
The Role
We’re three co‑founders who have built a live, revenue‑generating platform that real brands depend on every day. Now we’re looking for a founding engineering lead: someone who can take genuine ownership of our technical stack and grow into the CTO role.
You’ll look at what we’ve built, form a view of what needs to be consolidated, rebuilt, or replaced, and lead that work alongside us. The platform has users, real‑time manufacturing problems to solve, and lots of room to grow. You’ll have a small overseas development team who have built and understand the current stack, and a say in how that team evolves.
The co‑founders bring strong product instincts and commercial vision. You bring the technical expertise to challenge our thinking, push back when something shouldn’t be built, and contribute ideas we wouldn’t have landed on ourselves. We want a technical partner: if the fit is right, there’s a board seat and meaningful equity.
Who We’re Looking For
You want to see your code deployed daily and watch real users interact with it. You’re an expert in implementation and well‑versed in architecture. You work in a modern AI‑assisted workflow — Cursor, Claude, v0 — but you’re the one deciding what’s good enough to ship.
You can hold an architecture in your head and explain it clearly. You might have led or coordinated remote developers and know how to keep a distributed team moving. You have opinions about product and UX as well as code, and you act on them. You’re comfortable taking Framer mockups or Base44 wireframes and turning them into production‑ready systems. When a real‑world problem surfaces in our manufacturing flow, you can figure out the solution and build it.
You’re an excellent communicator with a few years of solid engineering experience — ideally at a scale‑up or larger tech company — who is ready to trade some stability for an ownership stake in a company tackling a huge industry that hasn’t meaningfully innovated in decades. We travel regularly to factories and clients in Asia, USA and Europe. You thrive on variety and you’re up for the occasional adventure.
- Strong TypeScript with React 19 and Next.js. You’ve shipped production applications, not just side projects
- Tailwind CSS with component primitives (Radix UI / shadcn/ui); comfortable with REST API client layers and complex form flows
- Solid backend experience with Laravel. REST APIs, Eloquent ORM, queues, middleware – you understand the full request lifecycle
- AWS experience; comfortable provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure
- Product sensibility & intuition. You can look at a feature and know whether it makes sense for the user before it ships, not just whether the code works.
Bonus Points
- Experience leading or coordinating remote developers; you can set standards, run code review, and keep a team accountable
- Shopify development – custom apps, Liquid, Storefront API, or headless builds
- CI/CD pipelines and Vercel deployments
- Active daily use of AI coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code
What We Offer
- Competitive salary, discussed openly based on experience
- Meaningful equity
- Performance bonus
- A real CTO pathway and a board seat
- A small, tight‑knit founding team that moves fast – factory visits in Asia, client meetings in Europe and the US, and a lot of building in between
- Hybrid, Central London.
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