Technical Co-Founder

Company Description

• Vector40 Legal Advisory is a law firm that's spinning out a new company that will develop DADA OS.

About the Opportunity

DADA OS is a pre-product, pre-funded regulatory alignment startup being built at the intersection of EU digital asset law and compliance infrastructure. We're looking for a technical co-founder to own product, engineering, and design end-to-end.

The founding insight — validated independently by 11 senior practitioners across four EU jurisdictions — is that regulated firms fail not because they lack legal advice, but because alignment breaks down across their business model, regulatory obligations, and internal policies. No system currently maintains that alignment as the firm evolves. DADA OS is that system.

The domain is EU-first: MiCA, PSD2, DORA, MiFID II, and related frameworks. The market timing is real — the MiCA transitional period ends June 30, 2026, and the first post-authorization examination cycle for licensed CASPs begins end-2026. The product needs to exist before those windows close.

This is a genuine co-founder role. You'll be joining at the founding stage with significant equity, shared decision-making authority, and full ownership of everything technical. Your co-founder brings deep legal and regulatory domain expertise — a U.S. attorney with direct EU MiCA advisory experience and an active network of EU compliance practitioners ready to pilot the product. You bring the technical architecture and product execution that turns that expertise into software.

We are pre-funding. The ask is real commitment at founding-stage conditions: meaningful equity, low or no cash pre-raise, and the understanding that this is a company you're building — not a job you're joining.

The Problem You're Solving

EU-licensed crypto firms (CASPs) routinely enter regulatory scrutiny with policies that contradict each other, business models that don't match their declared structure, and compliance decisions that were never formally documented. Legal advisors interpret the rules. Compliance teams build policies. Product teams build the business. None of these layers stay aligned as the firm evolves — and no tool currently ensures they do.

DADA OS maps a firm's actual operating model, connects it to the obligations activated across MiCA, PSD2, DORA, and related frameworks, surfaces where policies and decisions are out of alignment, and maintains that alignment as the business and the regulatory environment change.

This is a domain intelligence problem first and an engineering problem second. The hard part — knowing which regulatory frameworks apply, how they intersect, and where firms consistently break down — is owned by your co-founder. Your job is to make that intelligence structured, scalable, and persistent.

What You'll Own

You are the technical and product leader from day one. That means:

Product strategy and roadmap. Translating regulatory complexity into product requirements. Defining what we build, for whom, and in what order. Running design partner and pilot user conversations to validate and sharpen product direction.

Full-stack platform engineering. Architecting and shipping the core system: a structured intake interface, a multi-layer relational data model connecting business model inputs to regulatory obligations, a misalignment detection and alerting engine, and regulatory change monitoring with integrations to ESMA, EBA, and NCA data sources. This is a complex structured data problem — relationship modeling between decisions, obligations, policies, and ownership across multiple intersecting regulatory frameworks.

Design and UX. The primary user is a trained compliance professional. The interface needs to make multi-regime regulatory complexity navigable without oversimplifying it. You don't need to be a trained designer, but you need to own the craft until we hire for it.

Security and auditability. This is compliance infrastructure for regulated financial firms. How we build matters as much as what we build — SOC 2, audit trails, data handling, access controls, and the architecture decisions that make the system trustworthy to an NCA examiner's standard.

Technical hiring. As we grow, you'll define the engineering culture and bring in the early team.

Who You Are

A builder who has shipped real B2B products. You've taken complex systems from architecture to production in enterprise or professional services contexts. You know when to move fast and when rigor is non-negotiable. You've made infrastructure decisions you're proud of and learned from the ones you'd do differently.

Full-stack and senior. Comfortable across the stack — modern backend frameworks (Python or Node.js), relational and/or graph database design, REST API development, cloud infrastructure. You've designed data models with complex interdependencies and understand the difference between a data model that works and one that scales.

Drawn to structured complexity. Regulatory and compliance domains require structured thinking about relationships between rules, decisions, policies, and real-world operations. You find that kind of problem genuinely interesting — not just tolerably interesting.

Product-minded. You think about users before tickets. You can run a practitioner interview, identify where a workflow breaks, and translate that into a product requirement without being told what to build.

A true partner. You want to build a company, not join one. You're prepared to share ownership, commit through uncertainty, and work with a co-founder who has a different but complementary skill set. You can disagree productively and move forward.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in compliance software, legal technology, audit platforms, or regulated-industry enterprise SaaS
• Background building B2B products for financial services, insurance, or professional services firms

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• Prior startup or co-founding experience
• Familiarity with EU regulatory frameworks or cross-border financial regulation
• Experience with graph databases or knowledge graph architectures (relevant to the relationship modeling at the core of this product)
• Crypto or digital asset familiarity — useful context, not a requirement

What We Offer

• Significant co-founder equity with standard four-year vesting and one-year cliff
• Pre-raise: equity-only or minimal cash arrangement until pre-seed closes
• Post-raise: market-rate compensation alongside equity, targeting $150,000/year equivalent on a $1.2M pre-seed raise
• Full autonomy over product, engineering, and design
• A co-founder who handles the legal, regulatory, and domain side so you can focus on building — active EU compliance network, design partner relationships in Ireland, Netherlands, and Malta, and direct experience inside live MiCA authorization workflows
• Real market timing — identifiable demand triggers in 2026 with a defined early customer base
• A large, underserved market as crypto regulation accelerates across the EU, UK, and eventually the US

Location

This is an in-person co-founder role based in the Utah County / Silicon Slopes area of Utah. We're not looking for a remote arrangement — the early build phase requires real whiteboarding, fast feedback loops, and the kind of working relationship that's genuinely harder to build over video calls.

Our design partners and EU regulatory network are spread across Ireland, the Netherlands, Malta, and the UK, which creates meaningful time zone pressure already. We need our core founding team to be in the same room.

We're open to candidates who are currently based elsewhere and willing to relocate for the right opportunity. Co-founder equity levels tend to make relocation conversations different than they are for employee roles.

A Note on Stage and Fit

This is a founding-stage role. There is no product, no funding, and no team beyond the two of us. If you're looking for a funded startup with infrastructure already in place, this isn't the right fit yet.