Founding Engineer (Co-Founder)

Location: flexible (US or Europe)
Type: Full-time, Founding Team Member
Equity: Competitive founding team equity package

About thragma

thragma is the voice-powered memory platform. We turn photos into 'living memory cards' combining image, your own voice, and music creating a searchable library of your memories that can inspire physical products and experiences. In an era flooded with AI-generated content, thragma preserves authentic human stories captured 10 times faster through voice and shared selectively rather than broadcast.

With 100+ customer interviews, 40 paying beta customers, 98% retention intent, and a 30+ NPS score, we've validated that people desperately need this.

We're at the intersection of a $234bn global market opportunity, starting with Digital Memories and expanding into Personality Data, Physical Creations, and memory-centric Third Spaces.

The Role

As our Founding Engineer, you'll join as a co-founder building the technical foundation of thragma. You will act as both engineer and de facto product owner as we scale, working directly with users, our founder Charles, and our Founding Designer.

You'll be responsible for transforming our validated beta into a scalable platform that serves our initial target customers: 

  • new parents (25-34)

  • overwhelmed memory hoarders (25-35)

  • legacy-conscious families

This is a hands-on co-founder role where you'll ship fast, learn from real users, and build a market-defining product from the ground up.

Technical Scope

  • Full-stack ownership (frontend, backend, infrastructure)

  • Early architectural decisions for voice capture, media storage, and search

  • Pragmatic use of AI/ML for organization and retrieval (not generation)

  • Building for privacy, trust, and long-term data durability

What You'll Do

You will work directly with our Founder, our Founding Designer, and our users to design, build, and iterate the thragma platform. As a co-founder, you'll shape product strategy, company culture, and technical direction from day one. 

0-12 Months:

  • Lead MVP development and launch of Digital Memories platform

  • Design and implement the voice capture experience that makes storytelling 10x faster and feels natural, not performative

  • Build the searchable memory library architecture (AI assists organization while preserving authentic human stories without AI interference)

  • Design for ritualistic engagement - building a lifelong companion that people return to over time, not a one-time capture tool

12-24 Months:

  • Build the software infrastructure and APIs to support the Physical Creations offering that enables personalized gifts inspired by memories, bridging digital-to-physical experience

  • Integrate Personality Data features that understand individual taste profiles

  • Scale the platform to support 1,000+ active users

What success looks like (first 12 months)

  • A scalable MVP is live

  • Core systems for media storage, search, and personalization are reliable, privacy-first, and flexible enough to support 10–20× user growth without rewrites

Who You Are

Required:

  • Technical proficiency to build and ship features yourself (full-stack development experience required)

  • Experience with cloud-based infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

  • Proficiency in modern web technologies (React/Next.js, Node.js, or similar)

  • Understanding of scalable database design (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar)

  • Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

  • Shipped consumer products from 0 to 1, ideally with social or creative components

  • Deep empathy for user needs and proven ability to translate insights into shipped features

  • Comfortable with ambiguity and the chaos of early-stage startup life

Bonus Points:

  • Experience with voice interfaces or audio-based products

  • Background in social products

  • Experience with media processing pipelines and CDN architecture

  • Understanding of AI/ML applications in consumer products (RAG, embeddings, semantic search)

  • Personal passion for memory-keeping, storytelling, photography, or music

Why thragma

  • Solve a universal problem: Everyone has thousands of photos losing their context. You'll build the solution they wish existed.

  • True co-founder opportunity: Shape company culture, product philosophy, and strategic direction from day one.

  • Strong market validation: We have paying customers, strong retention, and clear product-market fit signals: now it's time to scale.

  • Mission-driven: This isn't about vanity metrics. Our customers tell us "I'd pay tens of thousands to get those memories back." The impact is real.

  • Backed by experts: Advisors include Harvard professors Michael Norton (Behavioral Science), Eva Ascarza (Marketing), and Rem Koning (Entrepreneurial Management).

Our Positioning:

We're creating a new category: selectively social media. Not social media (broadcast focussed), not cloud storage (no context). We're the voice-powered memory platform that captures the human stories behind your photos, giving you a searchable and shareable memory library that preserves authentic human connection across generations.

Our differentiators:

  1. Authentic - not generated with AI

  2. A continuous companion through your life - not a one-time memento

  3. Context-filled memories which connect photos, your voice narrative, and music

  4. Selectively social - a private memory library where memories can be shared with others by choice, rather than broadcast by default

  5. Memories from your whole life are captured digitally in a way that can be re-lived at any time

  6. Physical and digital worlds connected - a digital memory library that inspires physical creations and in-person connections

Our Values

  • Voice-native: Memories live in how we tell them, capturing stories through natural conversation

  • Beautifully human: Designed for emotional moments where aesthetic quality matters as much as functionality - we are all artists of ourselves

  • Selectively social: Built as a private library first that can be shared rather than a broadcast channel

  • Contextually rich: Focused on capturing the 'why' behind moments, not just the 'what', and built to make the 'how' fun, creative, and fulfilling

  • Ritualistic: A new process for us to curate our memories over time, a lifelong companion

  • Authentic: A natural capture of the human experience without AI interference

  • Creative: Memory is a creative expression, we can all be artists

The Founder

Charles Graham (HBS MBA '26) studied Archaeology & Ancient History at Oxford, founded his first business at 16, operated as FTSE-250 c-suite executive for strategy & innovation, and writes a Substack on memory with paid subscribers. His father died before he was born so only a few mementos remain for half his history. This is personal.

Apply

Send the following to charles@thragma.com:

  • Your resume or LinkedIn

  • A brief note (3-5 minutes to read) about:

    • A product you shipped that you're proud of and why

    • Your most meaningful memory and what makes it special

    • Why now for thragma