The role
ZigTale is hiring its first full-time engineer. You'll build our app every day, remotely, with weekly in-person meetings in Lancaster, PA, and with AI models and coding agents in the loop.
You'll own your work end to end, not just close tickets. You'll care about the tap that feels 100 ms too slow, the illustration that's slightly off, and the parent email with a typo in it. Then you'll fix them, test them on a real phone, and ship.
You'll report to an advisor to ZigTale who built the current platform and works with ZigTale part-time. He'll manage you, set the quality bar and review your work; you'll be the one person building ZigTale full-time. Our founders, Vincenzo and Carla, aren't based in Lancaster and work with us remotely.
About ZigTale
ZigTale (https://zigtale.com) brings a child's own drawings, voice and ideas into stories that grow over time, chapter by chapter. Our goal is simple: use technology with care, so children’s imagination can grow bigger.
It started with a drawing. Our founders, Vincenzo and Carla, are engineers by training and parents at heart. One morning their son finished a pen drawing of a submarine adventure and wished he could tell everything happening in it. From the other room came a second voice: “Yes! I want to tell that adventure too!” ZigTale exists because every child carries stories worth bringing to life.
What we believe:
Imagination comes first. AI follows a child's imagination — it never replaces it.
For families, with families. Parents stay in control, and beta families shape what we build.
Technology with purpose. Kids create; less passive screen time, not more.
Safe, simple and meaningful. Age-appropriate content in a protected creative space.
We're in beta today: selected families use ZigTale as a web app on their phones.
What you'll do
Ship features and fixes end to end in our TypeScript and React web app, from ticket to a tested release on staging and production.
Own the quality of our AI features: prompts, model choice, speed, cost, and what happens when a provider fails.
Test on real phones and tablets (iPhone, iPad and Android), the devices families actually use, and keep screenshot evidence before you call something done.
Protect children's data: privacy-first design, parental consent, content moderation, and COPPA-minded habits in every change.
Run several AI coding agents at once, review their output like a skeptic, and keep tests and release checks green.
Read what beta families tell us, find the friction, and fix it fast.
Write down what you learn: runbooks, incident notes, and the reasons behind decisions.
What you'll bring
We care more about what you've built than how many years you've been doing it. You'll need:
You build with AI most days. Frontier models (Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Google's Gemini) and coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) are how you work now. You can show us what you built with them.
You've shipped software people use. A production web app, a client project, or a side project with real users.
Solid engineering and devops fundamentals. TypeScript and React, SQL databases, APIs, and debugging problems in production. If your strength is another language, show us how you've picked up a new one.
Hands-on generative media. You've used at least one image, video or voice model in something you built — for example Runway, ElevenLabs, or Gemini's image models.
A skeptic's eye for AI output. You read the diff, write the test, and catch the model when it's confidently wrong.
An obsession with details. You notice the misaligned pixel and the confusing sentence, and you follow through until they're fixed.
Clear writing. You can explain what changed, why, and what's still risky.
Full-time, with weekly in-person meetings. ZigTale would be your only full-time job. You work remotely at least five days a week, live in or near Lancaster (including the York, Harrisburg or Reading areas), and can attend in-person meetings in Lancaster at least…