Senior Web Developer

ABOUT METANAUT LABS

Metanaut Labs Inc. is a Canadian technology company founded in 2015 — and one of the very first studios in Canada to build virtual reality experiences professionally. The name Metanaut is a combination of metaverse and astronaut, and it reflects the founding ethos of the company: explore what others have not yet explored, and build things that did not previously exist.

The company was founded by one of the early developers on the Android OS team, and the founding team brings backgrounds in industrial design and engineering — disciplines that instilled a deep appreciation for first-principles thinking, rigorous design, and building things that actually work in the real world, not just on a whiteboard.

Over nearly a decade in VR and AR, Metanaut earned its reputation the hard way: winning the Leap Motion Competition in 2016, being selected for HTC’s Vive X accelerator program, and delivering award-winning games and educational VR experiences. The company’s values — Spark Wonder, Always Be Exploring, Prioritize Excellence, and Make Something Fun for Everyone — were forged during those years.

But those same values are exactly what led Metanaut to where it is now.

Why We’re Pivoting

The economy today is K-shaped. At the top of that K, asset owners — people with investment portfolios — have seen their wealth compound steadily, especially since 2020. At the bottom of that K, people who rely entirely on their salary are falling further behind. Home ownership, once a reasonable expectation for working people, is increasingly out of reach for a generation of Canadians and Americans who earn good incomes but cannot save fast enough to keep up with asset price inflation.

The hard truth is that in the modern economy, a salary alone is rarely enough. Building wealth through investing — owning equities, understanding companies, making informed decisions with your savings — has become not just a smart move but a near-necessity for anyone who wants to own a home, retire comfortably, or build financial security for their family.

The problem is that serious investment research — the kind that institutional investors do every day — is completely inaccessible to most individuals. Professional investors have teams of analysts, Bloomberg terminals, proprietary research pipelines, and decades of experience reading between the lines of regulatory filings. Retail investors have Google and hope.

That gap is what Rising Theory is designed to close. Our founder has been investing successfully for over 15 years and understands from firsthand experience how much of an edge comes simply from knowing how to read a 10-K carefully, how to spot when a company is burying bad news in legalese, and how to track how a company’s story changes from one year to the next. Rising Theory is the tool he wished had existed when he started — and the tool he believes a generation of new investors urgently needs.

Metanaut is not abandoning its values in this pivot. We are applying them to a new and, we believe, more urgent problem. We are still exploring what others haven’t. We are still building something that didn’t exist before. And we are still trying to make something that leaves a genuinely positive impact — this time, on the financial futures of everyday people.

ABOUT RISING THEORY

Rising Theory is a subscription-based web application being built by Metanaut Labs Inc. — a Canadian technology company — to help retail and professional investors uncover material insights and red flags hidden inside SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, DEF 14A) without having to read hundreds of pages of dense legal language.

Unlike competitors that produce AI-generated summaries — which can obscure exactly the kind of subtle wording changes that matter most to investors — Rising Theory surfaces verbatim quotes directly from the original SEC filings, paired with a short AI-generated explanation of why that change is materially significant. The user is never asked to simply trust the AI. Every insight is verifiable against the source document.

The platform also provides a 10-year year-over-year historical snapshot of each company’s filings, giving investors long-term narrative context that point-in-time tools simply cannot offer. The product is purpose-built for qualitative research and is designed to be the most transparent and trustworthy AI-powered filing analysis tool available to everyday investors.

THE ROLE

As the first and founding Senior Web Developer at Metanaut Labs, you will be the technical co-builder of Rising Theory. You will join after the core prototype and parsing pipeline have been completed by the founder, and your mandate will be to take that proven foundation and build a production-grade, scalable, secure web platform on top of it.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role at a lean startup. You will have meaningful say in the technical architecture, tooling choices, and development practices. You will be working directly with the founder and project lead, Peter Kao, day-to-day. The expectation is that the platform reaches public launch in Q3 2027.

WHAT YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

• Platform Architecture & Full-Stack Development
• Design and build the full web application from front-end UI to back-end APIs
• Architect a system that can reliably ingest, process, store, and display SEC filing data at scale
• Build the multi-stage AI inference pipeline integration, connecting the filing parser outputs to the LLM layer and then to the user-facing interface
• Ensure the platform can handle large, unstructured HTML documents from EDGAR reliably and consistently
• AI Pipeline Integration
• Collaborate with the founder to integrate the existing multi-stage classification and section-extraction pipeline into the production platform
• Build the orchestration layer that routes filing content through the appropriate AI prompts at each stage of analysis
• Implement the verbatim quote extraction and display logic that is central to Rising Theory’s core value proposition
• Work with the Anthropic Claude API (current inference provider) and architect the system to remain model-agnostic over time
• Security & Compliance
• Build the platform with security-first principles given that users will have paid accounts and sensitive usage data
• Implement authentication, authorization, session management, and data protection practices appropriate for a financial SaaS product
• Ensure the platform does not expose raw AI prompts, pipeline logic, or proprietary parsing methods to end users
• Subscription & Billing Infrastructure
• Integrate a payment processor (e.g., Stripe) for monthly and annual SaaS subscriptions at USD $19.99/month and USD $203.90/year
• Build account management, subscription lifecycle, and access control flows
• Performance, Reliability & Deployment
• Own the DevOps and deployment infrastructure — CI/CD pipelines, hosting, monitoring, and alerting
• Optimize for fast page loads and low latency on AI-generated insight delivery, including appropriate caching strategies
• Maintain high uptime standards appropriate for a paid subscription product
• Code Quality & Maintainability
• Write clean, well-documented, maintainable code that can be understood and extended over a multi-year build
• Establish coding standards, testing practices, and review processes from the ground up
• Keep the architecture modular so individual pipeline stages can be updated without rebuilding the entire system

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of full-stack web development experience in production environments
• Strong proficiency in a modern JavaScript/TypeScript stack (e.g., React or Next.js on the front end; Node.js, Python, or similar on the back end)
• Hands-on experience building and deploying SaaS web applications with real users and paid subscriptions
• Solid understanding of REST API design, database architecture (relational and/or document stores), and data modeling
• Experience working with large language model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or similar) in production systems — not just personal projects
• Proven ability to design multi-stage data processing pipelines that handle unstructured or semi-structured input
• Strong knowledge of web application security: authentication, authorization, data encryption, and protection against common attack vectors (OWASP Top 10)
• Experience with cloud hosting and DevOps — CI/CD, containerization (Docker), monitoring, and logging
• Ability to work independently with a high degree of ownership and accountability in a remote, small-team environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English — you will be working closely with a non-developer founder and need to explain technical decisions clearly

NICE TO HAVE

• Familiarity with SEC EDGAR, financial filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K), or financial data APIs
• Experience parsing or processing large HTML or XML documents — especially ones without clean semantic structure
• Background working with or at fintech, regtech, or investment research companies
• Experience building AI-powered applications where transparency and source attribution are core design requirements
• Familiarity with Stripe or comparable subscription billing platforms
• Experience with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or multi-stage LLM pipeline design
• Prior startup or early-stage company experience where you were the founding or sole developer

WHAT WE OFFER

• CAD $120,000 annual salary — a meaningful, competitive compensation at a lean startup
• Full remote — work from anywhere in Canada (Canada-based candidates preferred for timezone and legal simplicity)
• Direct access to and collaboration with the founder every day — no layers of management, no bureaucracy
• High autonomy and real technical ownership over a greenfield production system
• The opportunity to be the founding technical hire at a product that has genuine product-market fit potential and a fully funded development runway
• A meaningful problem to work on — helping everyday investors access information that has historically been out of reach

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT

This is not a role for someone who needs a large team around them to do their best work. It is not a role for someone who wants to specialize narrowly — you will need to go deep across the full stack. It is not a role at a company flush with VC money and unlimited runway; we are lean, focused, and deliberate about how we spend. And it is not a role where you will be handed a finished spec — you will help shape how this product is built.

HOW TO APPLY

To apply, please send the following to [email protected] :

• Your resume or LinkedIn profile
• A brief paragraph (3–5 sentences) describing a publicly launched paid product you built that involved processing large or unstructured data — what was the problem, what did you build, and what was the outcome
• Links to any relevant public work (GitHub, portfolio, live products)

Applications that include the brief paragraph above will be given priority. We are a small team and we read every application personally.