Senior Technical Owner — Live iOS Rhythm Game

I'm the founder of a live iOS mobile game — music/rhythm genre, large content catalog, subscription + rewarded ads + IAP. Think the Magic Tiles model. We're live on the App Store, revenue is flowing, and we ship daily. I'll share the app privately with serious applicants. Here's the unusual part: I build very fast with an AI-driven development workflow. Features that take most teams a sprint ship here in a day. What I don't have is the senior engineer who makes it all sound — the person who owns the architecture, the data, and the operations underneath that speed, and who tells me plainly when I'm about to build something dumb. That's this role. What you'd own Backend & infra (Python API, Postgres, subscriptions/receipt validation, caching, cost control) — hardening fast-built systems into boring, production-grade ones without rewriting the world Analytics end to end — design and implement the event taxonomy (Mixpanel, AppsFlyer, and similar) so every number is trustworthy, then actually read it and bring me ideas LiveOps — App Store releases, OTA update pipeline, crash monitoring, staged rollouts, incident response Reviewing AI-generated code with senior judgment: what's solid, what's a time bomb, what to fix first First 90 days, in order: analytics we can bet money on → backend hardening → LiveOps automation. The experience that matters most You've been on the technical inside of a mobile game/app doing $500K–$1M+/month — you know that machine from the engine room, not the case study You've supported large paid-UA operations (AppLovin MAX, AppsFlyer/Adjust, SKAN) and know what breaks when a campaign 10x's installs overnight You've operated at millions of installs / hundreds of thousands of DAU — real load, real fraud/refund/attribution mess 8+ years shipping; you've held the senior seat (lead/principal/first engineer/CTO) somewhere small enough that it was actually on you You've built instrumentation yourself, not just read someone's dashboards Excellent written English. Proactive. You flag risks early and explain tradeoffs to a non-engineer without condescension Bonus: audio/real-time systems, rhythm/music games, or hybrid mobile (Capacitor/React Native class) Stack: hybrid iOS app (web tech in a native shell), Python backend, Postgres, RevenueCat, standard mobile analytics/attribution, OTA updates. Not a fit: agencies or staffing shops (one person, no logo). WordPress/website portfolios. Web3-only or AAA-console-only. Narrow-slice engineers from big teams. Profiles listing forty technologies with depth in none. Anyone allergic to AI-assisted development — it's how this company works. Details: Long-term. Start at ~15–20 focused hrs/week with room to grow. Remote, any location, some US Eastern overlap. Rate negotiable — I pay well for excellence and don't spread budget across average people. To apply — skip the template, answer four things: Your last operation: the product, your role, the scale, and what you personally owned. The hardest technical problem you solved on a live consumer app — what broke, how you fixed it. The highest-revenue app you've worked on, and one thing about running at that scale that outsiders always get wrong. One question you'd want answered before touching someone else's codebase. First step for the finalist is a paid one-week trial project with a concrete deliverable. You'll know exactly where you stand.