Lead Software Engineer

About Us

Beast Industries is a multifaceted media and entertainment company founded by Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast, the most watched person in the world. Renowned for revolutionizing digital content creation, Beast Industries encompasses a diverse portfolio of ventures that extend far beyond its origins on YouTube. With a mission to entertain, inspire, and create significant social impact, Beast Industries operates across various domains including digital media, philanthropy, consumer products, and innovative business initiatives. At Beast Industries, we believe in the transformative power of digital media and its potential to entertain, educate, and effect positive change. Our commitment to innovation, creativity, and philanthropy drives us to explore new frontiers, create unforgettable experiences, and build a legacy that inspires future generations.

Founding Technical Lead

Location: Mountain View, CA (On-site Focus, 4+ days/week) 

About Us: MrBeast Industries is synonymous with groundbreaking content that captures global attention on an unprecedented scale. We're known for pushing boundaries and redefining what's possible in the digital landscape. We are now launching a stealth new venture, a platform poised to create a new paradigm for how content achieves 1000x impact and transformative audience engagement.

The Opportunity: Build the Engine for the Next Evolution of Content. This is a rare chance to be the foundational technical architect of a platform with the potential to reshape the creator ecosystem, amplified by the unique reach and innovative spirit of MrBeast. As our first dedicated Tech Lead, you will be the cornerstone of our engineering efforts, shaping our technology, culture, and product trajectory from day one. You will guide our V1 platform through its launch and then spearhead its evolution into an intelligent, massively scalable system that will empower creators and brands worldwide in entirely new ways. If you're driven to build something with truly global impact and legendary potential, this is your moment.

What You'll Do:

• Platform Vision & Scalability: Drive the architectural evolution of our V1 platform (Next.js, NestJS, MongoDB, AWS) to support exponential growth, new intelligent features, and millions of dynamic user interactions. Your vision will ensure we can handle MrBeast-level scale.
• Strategic Technical Leadership: Collaborate closely with leadership to translate ambitious product goals into a pragmatic, high-velocity technical roadmap. Make critical build vs. buy decisions that accelerate our mission.
• Hands-On Architect & Builder: This is a deeply technical, player-coach role. Expect to spend significant time (60-70% initially) in the code, architecting and building resilient backend systems, robust APIs, and contributing to critical system components.
• Founding Team & Culture Catalyst: Recruit, onboard, and mentor our initial agile team of 2-3 engineers (spanning backend/ML and product engineering). Foster a high-ownership, rapid-learning culture obsessed with impact and innovation.
• Champion of Engineering Excellence: Define and embed best practices for modern software development: exemplary code quality, comprehensive testing, efficient CI/CD, insightful observability, and secure, scalable infrastructure on AWS.
• AI-Powered Future: Partner with our AI/ML talent and integrate cutting-edge intelligent features that unlock new levels of content understanding, discovery, and performance optimization. You'll build the robust systems that AI will thrive on.
• Operational Command: Ensure rock-solid production readiness, defining and meeting SLOs/SLAs, and establishing sustainable on-call practices.

Who You Are:

• A highly experienced software engineer (5-10+ years) with a clear track record of architecting, building, and shipping complex, scalable web applications and distributed systems that have seen significant user traffic.
• Proven in a technical leadership role (Tech Lead, Staff/Principal Engineer, or EM of a nimble, high-output team) for at least 2-3 years, with the ability to inspire and elevate your peers.
• Deep expertise in modern backend development (Node.js, with a strong preference for NestJS, and TypeScript).
• Strong proficiency with frontend technologies, ideally React (Next.js preferred), and a passion for building intuitive user experiences.
• Solid experience with database design, optimization, and management (MongoDB essential; PostgreSQL a plus).
• Production-grade mastery of AWS services (e.g., S3, Lambda, EC2, API Gateway, ECS/Fargate, DynamoDB, CloudFront). Demonstrable experience with IaC (Terraform/CDK) is a significant advantage.
• A pragmatic and visionary architect who excels at balancing speed with robust design in fast-paced, "zero-to-one" environments.
• Genuinely excited by the creator economy, digital media, and the challenge of building tools that operate at an unprecedented scale.
• An exceptional communicator, capable of conveying complex technical ideas clearly to diverse audiences and fostering strong collaborative relationships.
• A natural mentor, dedicated to the growth and success of your team members.
• Experience managing technical transitions or taking ownership of existing codebases and rapidly iterating on them.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with video processing, media asset management, or content delivery networks (CDNs).
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and a history of integrating ML models or AI services into production applications (e.g., SageMaker, ML APIs).
• Experience with real-time data pipelines and large-scale analytics.
• Previous startup experience, especially launching V1 products.

Why This is a Unique Opportunity:

• Build Something Legendary: Create a platform from its early stages that will leverage the MrBeast brand to achieve unparalleled global impact. This is a legacy-building role.
• Foundational Influence: As the first technical leader, your impact on the technology, product strategy, and engineering culture will be profound and lasting.
• True Ownership & Impact: We offer a competitive salary and significant equity in a venture with explosive growth potential. Your contributions will directly shape our success.
• The MrBeast Ecosystem: Access an unparalleled network of creative talent, industry-leading partners, and innovative thinkers.

Compensation
The base salary range for this role is $100,000–$220,000, depending on background and level of experience.

Benefits

The Perks, Why Work On the MrBeast Team

• Competitive Salary
• Generous Medical (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Dental, Vision and company-paid Life Insurance 
• Company contributions to employee Health Savings Accounts (HSA) 
• 401k Plan with Safe Harbor company-matching 
• Flexible vacation policy and paid company holidays
• Company-provided technology package 
• Relocation when applicable for those coming in from outside the Greenville, NC area including travel and company-provided housing for the first 90 days