Equity range: 3-8% 🤝

Location: Anywhere in the Nordics. Onsite or hybrid. 🇳🇴🇩🇰🇸🇪🇫🇮🇮🇸

☕️ Grab a coffee. This job description is long. If you're the right person, we think you'll be glad you read it.

For the last decade, The Hub has been the only dedicated recruitment platform for Nordic startups. 15,000 startups have posted nearly 100,000 jobs on our platform, generating 3 million applications. Some founders have hired every key person on their journey through The Hub, and we estimate roughly 50,000 hires have been facilitated since our inception.

For most of that time, The Hub was a non-profit backed by Denmark's largest bank. It became an incredible brand and a key piece of recruitment infrastructure for the Nordic startup ecosystem, but it was never built like a business. In 2023, a tiny team took over the platform and began changing that. Since then, we've transformed The Hub from a non-profit with a massive footprint into a profitable, focused business with 10,000 daily active users, years of baked-in distribution, deep ecosystem trust, and a clear right to win.

Now we've closed an angel round from a group of prominent Nordic angel investors, including Olympic champion Aksel Lund Svindal, alongside world-class founders from Tise, Superside, Kahoot, Firi and more.

That sets up a rare next chapter, because the category itself is finally being reshaped. Technology has transformed holidays, transport, food, finance, and almost every other major category.

Recruitment is next.

AI is redefining how companies and people find each other. A wave of AI-native players has already raised significant capital to build agentic sourcing, automated screening, and talent intelligence. Most of them are chasing the same obvious market: helping companies with the deepest pockets compete for the same top 1% of global talent.

No one is building for the founder making her first few hires in the Nordics.

We are. We always have. 

In startup hiring, the stakes are different. The right person bends a company's whole trajectory and shapes its culture. The wrong one can quietly kill it. But startups do not have endless hiring budgets, famous employer brands, or roles to fill on repeat.

That is exactly why they are overlooked. The Hub is where Nordic founders build their teams.

Our bet is simple. We've entered a builder's era, and startups are about to thrive like never before. This round lets us build the version of The Hub the next generation of them actually deserves. Not just a place that serves founders, but one that finally builds the hiring tools only they need.

If this future excites you, come help us build it.

Opportunity

This is the single most important hire The Hub will ever make. We are looking for a co-founder level CTO to set the technical direction end-to-end, from a clean strategic position, and build a platform that can reshape how Nordic, and eventually European, startups compete for talent globally.

You are the first in-house engineer at the company and will have full ownership and agency over what gets built and how. You're a true generalist: DevOps, backend, frontend, AI engineering, data systems, product thinking, growth experiments. You pick things up and get your hands dirty.

First and foremost, you're a passionate product builder. You're excited about the opportunity to build something that makes a real difference to how millions of people spend most of their lives: their job. You want to build at the bleeding edge of AI, whether that's by using the latest AI models or by simply talking to a customer. The impact is what matters to you, and you're able to think about the customer, the product, and the technology simultaneously.

What you'll do

Technical leadership across the marketplace

From platform administration to transactional emails, The Hub is a marketplace with legacy systems, facilitating use cases across admin, candidates, and job posters. The Hub certainly isn't rocket science, but the seniority we need is the kind that can hold all of it in their head at once.

This is a build-from-scratch role where you will flex both technical and strategic excellence: AI-native architecture, DevOps, analytics, performance, observability, compliance, security, data processing, product engineering across B2B and B2C surfaces, GTM engineering, aggregation, and integrations.

We respect that it is hard to cover every domain at world-class depth in one person. You'll have the resources to hire one to two specialists from the start to unlock deep value in the domains you deem most critical, or to fill your blanks. Maybe you already know who the first one is. The important part is that you're ultimately responsible, and that both comforts and motivates you.

Product engineering, end-to-end

Beyond owning everything-tech, you'll be obsessed with our product. You will design, build, and ship product features, many of them built on LLMs.

The product principle is solving what makes a good startup hire, for the founder and the candidate at the same time, through whatever surface delivers it best. How do we optimize matchmaking between people and jobs in a world that has moved beyond spec lists and CVs? We have 100 high-impact things to build. Which ten ship first, and why? How do we delight a founder or a candidate in the first two minutes of signing up?

You'd own both sides of the product end-to-end: the company experience (how hiring managers brief us, see talent, and decide) and the talent experience (how candidates get found, profiled, and introduced). UX, UI, and the conversational agent inside it. All of it.

Deep overarching technical understanding and decision-making, with builder mentality and taste. Do, don't just delegate.

What you'll walk into

What you walk into is rare. Ten years of brand, trust, distribution, and data, on a profitable baseline, with fresh founder backing. We are not looking for product-market fit; we are looking to operationalize and scale a winning model while reinventing the platform beneath it. The job is to build the new while scaling the proven.

Alex, our senior full-stack engineer, is deep on the 1.0 codebase and will be your right hand from day one. He currently owns and maintains the existing platform.

The stack is Nuxt 2 / Vue 2, Node.js + Keystone, MongoDB + Mongoose, OpenAI for AI features, Nginx, AWS (S3, EC2) + DigitalOcean, plus a Chrome extension. The platform connects with several integrations and tools, including GA4 for web analytics, Stripe for payments, Mailchimp for transactional emails, IMGIX for CDN, Google Cloud for geocoding, 5-10 custom XML feeds, and 5 ATS integrations.

The hardest part of this role is doing two things at once: shipping new, AI-native features while modernizing a ten-year-old platform underneath them, without stopping the business. The two easy answers are both wrong. Keep patching the old system and you never escape it. Tear it down for a clean rewrite and you stall growth for a year and throw away a decade of hard-won edge cases. The job is the harder middle path: decide what to keep, what to rebuild, and what to replace, and in what order, while the platform stays live and keeps growing. Greenfield where it matters, legacy where it serves us.

In the first 6 months, you will stabilize the platform, choose the architecture for The Hub 2.0, ship the first AI-native workflows, and hire 1-2 people.

From months 6-18, you will rebuild the core platform, data layer, and candidate/company experience while growing the engineering team deliberately.

Who you are

• You're most likely an ex-founder who's done a CTO stint, or a strong builder ready to step into the seat for the first time.

• You have made architecture decisions with long-term consequences and have experience working with messy real-world product/data systems.

• You get energized, not frustrated, by evolving a living system. You've shipped new product on top of legacy before, and you'd rather modernize a stack that already serves 10,000 daily users than insist on a greenfield rewrite with your preferred tools.

• You're high agency and take ownership without needing to be told what to do. You like being given hard, complex problems and finding creative solutions.

• You use AI-native development tools (Cursor / Claude Code / v0) as part of your daily workflow, but you know where human judgment, architecture, security, and taste still matter.

• You're a product engineer at heart and you've shipped products that scale, with the analytics and observability instincts to know when something is broken before users tell you.

• You can attract, assess, and lead strong engineers, not by creating process theatre, but by setting a high bar, making good technical decisions, and creating an environment where excellent people do their best work.

• You are excellent individually, but understand that a small team of exceptional people is so much more than the sum of its parts. We're going to be spending a lot of time together and we have no space on the team for brilliant jerks.

• This role will not fit someone who needs a spec to get started or thinks AI is hype.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and generous equity: Compensation depends on seniority, salary/equity preference, and founder-level fit, with standard equity vesting.

• Perks that matter: A brand-new MacBook, personal wellbeing and phone budget, remote and flexible work, and six weeks paid holiday.

• Build from scratch: You will own technical strategy, product architecture, engineering hires, and the technical side of our company-building journey.

• High impact: Your work shapes the trajectory of The Hub, thousands of startups and people, and the entire Nordic ecosystem.

• Industry-defining: You'll be at the forefront of HR-tech, a dinosaur industry that's about to transform.

Recruitment process

• Step 1: Initial conversation with Thomas (CEO) or Ellen (Head of Operations) to explore motivations, experiences, and mutual fit (30 minutes).

• Step 2: Role-based interview with Thomas or one of our advisors (seasoned founders and engineers on our cap table, 45 minutes).

• Step 3: Paid mini assignment: a tightly scoped, practical build session with us. No free consulting, no take-home theatre.

• Step 4: Final conversation with Thomas: values, ways of working, and the bet itself (45 minutes).

• We're reviewing through the summer, sneaking in some beach time along the way, then giving this our full focus in August, with one goal: the right hire, not the quick one.

  
  

Let's redefine how startups and talent connect, and have a ton of fun in the process.