CTO wanted for Doppler - AI engine for short-term rental optimization

Proven Builder: You are a hands-on engineer with a strong track record of building and shipping impactful data and machine learning products.

Technical Depth: Deep technical command of Python (FastAPI) and/or React/TypeScript, alongside modern data tooling (e.g., Polars, SQL).

Relevant Experience: Experience with or a strong aptitude for developing search/ranking systems, large-scale web scraping, vector search (pgvector), and ML models (e.g., LightGBM).

Infrastructure Acumen: Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (e.g., Supabase, Cloudflare Workers, Docker) and MLOps basics.

Product Evolution: Ability to architect and drive the technical evolution of a product from initial lean MVPs (simple, technical) to a sophisticated, agentic system.

Team Leadership: Excitement to build, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering team from the ground up.

Startup Mindset: Possess extreme ownership, a bias for action, and thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment.

• Scraping
• Algorithms
• Machine Learning
• Fullstack
• Embeddings
• React
• Data Engineering

You have strengths in...

• numbers, data and logic
• organizing and keeping stuff tidy
• pushing and getting things done

Architect, build, and deploy the core AI engine for property matching and insights, from data ingestion to actionable recommendations.

Lead the technical development of the full-stack application, ensuring a robust and scalable user experience.

Drive the evolution of the product through distinct phases: from a simple, lean MVP to a technically sophisticated system, and ultimately to a full agentic platform.

Establish and manage the cloud infrastructure, ensuring reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
Build, mentor, and grow a world-class engineering team capable of tackling complex data and ML challenges.

Define and execute the technical roadmap, delivering the v1 product in 8 weeks and iterating rapidly based on user feedback.

- Significant equity (30-40%) with a clear path to life-changing impact.
- The opportunity to build a foundational AI product from scratch with high autonomy.
- A remote-first, async-first working model within CET±2 timezone.
- Focus on real engineering challenges and measurable business impact.
- Potential for pre-funding stipend and market-competitive compensation post-funding.

Unlocking hidden potential in short-term rental properties through AI-powered data matching and optimization

An AI-powered matching and optimization suite for STRs, identifying undervalued listings by comparing them with successful comparable properties. It provides actionable improvement insights, dynamic pricing, occupancy forecasts, and guest sentiment analysis, along with consultancy (TFAs

Challenges

◦ Data access & quality: Reliably collecting complete, structured listing data from diverse niche portals while respecting technical/legal limits (e.g., Airbnb's prohibition on automated scraping), and identifying "bad data" (e.g., unrealistic availability, properties with few reviews claiming high performance, or homes split into multiple listings)

◦ Accurate matching: Building a comp-set engine that finds truly relevant "look-alike" rentals and produces trustworthy, explainable recommendations, ensuring algorithms generalize well across various markets and property types

◦ Adoption & trust: Convincing property owners (especially those unfamiliar with optimization strategies) to engage with the tool and act on its suggestions, overcoming their lack of market understanding and low visibility in competitive markets

Target group

◦ Private property owners aged 60+
◦ They own old properties in urban areas
◦ Their properties are in the high-price segment of rentals
◦ These owners are unaware of the rental market business or listing optimization logic
◦ They do not use third-party portfolio managers
◦ Their properties are typically listed on third-party sites