Ask HN: Founding Engineer/CTO (equity) for music rights/data infra (UK/US)
I’m building a quiet, behind-the-scenes data/permissions infrastructure product for music—infra, not consumer/streaming. Goal is simple: turn messy ownership + policy into clean, programmable rails so a music-use request can become a verifiable licence in seconds.
What you’d own (0→1): • v1 APIs: /resolve → /quote → /license.issue • Data plumbing: record linkage/de-dup (think ISRC↔ISWC), audit trail, versioning • Reliability: auth, idempotency, webhooks, retries, observability
Must have: shipped production APIs; Python or Go; Postgres; basic AWS/GCP; security (JWT, key rotation, webhook sigs). Nice: entity resolution/IR, DDEX/CWR, Stripe/Adyen (pre-auth/escrow), ACR/vendor integrations.
Stage & terms: lean two-person team; advance POC / early MVP by Dec ’25 to support a pre-seed. Equity-heavy co-founder role (cash post-funding). Location: UK or US; London preferred; remote OK within GMT±5.
If interested, please reply with a link to something you’ve shipped (repo/product) and a couple of time windows, or email workritwikpunjwani@gmail.com.
Why can’t you build this by yourself? Even pre-LLM, a halfway decent mid level developer could do this by themselves 3 months. This could definitely be vibe coded in less time.
What exactly do you bring to the table? Do you have relationships with people in the music industry? Relationships with VCs?
The fact that you couldn’t find anyone in the industry you’re targeting to give you angel funding is telling.