The Mission

Our mission is to help people live life on their own terms — financial freedom, time freedom, and creative freedom. Our flagship product, the Lifestyle Business Academy (LBA), is the most direct expression of that mission — my vision is for it to become the world’s best online business school, a genuine alternative to a traditional MBA.

Alongside that, we also have a media arm where we make inspiring, educational content for free, for millions of viewers per month, across two creator-led personal brands (Ali Abdaal & Izzy Sealey).

We’re Looking for an Awesome Software Engineer

I’m looking for a brilliant full-time AI-native Software Developer to work in-person with me and the team in Hong Kong.

This is not a normal software engineering role where you sit in a backlog, pick up tickets, and ship features someone else has perfectly specified.

It’s more like: founding engineer / AI-native technical operator / product-minded builder.

The mission is to turn messy, high-friction parts of the business into fast, reliable, AI-powered software — both internal tools that make the team radically better, and student- and viewer-facing products that could be used by millions of free users and tens of thousands of paying customers.

The first major focus will be Lifestyle Business Academy — our online business school helping entrepreneurs build profitable, sustainable businesses — but over time this role could touch almost every part of Sparkle Studios: education, content, operations, software, analytics, and student-facing products.

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys sitting next to a founder, hearing a messy workflow described out loud, asking the right questions, and then shipping a working v1 within hours rather than weeks, this could be a very fun role.

The Role at a Glance

• Location: Hong Kong (Causeway Bay), in-person. This is essential. I want someone I can work with shoulder-to-shoulder most days.
• Type: Full-time.
• Salary: Whatever it takes to get someone awesome.
• Start date: As soon as we find the right person.
• Work authorisation: Hong Kong permanent residency or valid work visa preferred. But we can sponsor a visa too 🙂

Why This Role Exists

Sparkle Studios has grown into a multi-part business:

• Content — YouTube, newsletters, social, and the Ali Abdaal & Izzy Sealey creator ecosystem.
• Education — Lifestyle Business Academy, helping entrepreneurs build their first serious online business.
• Software — products like Superfocus, VoicePal, CreatorGrid, and future internal/student-facing tools.

The opportunity is that we have a lot of high-leverage workflows that could be made dramatically better with software and AI.

The problem is that many of them currently live across Notion, Slack, Google Sheets, Circle, WordPress, WooCommerce, FunnelKit, Zapier, dashboards, scripts, and random human workarounds.

That creates friction:

• Coaches waste time hunting for context and doing operational admin type stuff, rather than spending all their time serving our students.
• Ops people don’t always know what broke.
• Data pipelines need babysitting.
• Students end up with too many separate tools, which makes their lives harder.
• Useful AI ideas stay as ideas because no one has the dedicated capacity to turn them into real systems.
• I become the bottleneck for product decisions, tool choices, bug reports, and “could we build a thing that does X?” moments.

So the goal is to hire someone who can sit inside the business and make the machine better every week.

The long-term dream is to build our own student-facing platform: a premium, AI-native student cockpit where courses, tools, templates, AI coaches, scorecards, community, coaching and commerce all live together in a beautiful web-based platform/app.

But the immediate job is not to disappear for six months and build a giant student platform.

The immediate job is to ship useful software fast — internal tools that make our coaching, operations, data, and student-support systems 10x better, and student- and viewer-facing tools that real users love — letting the bigger platform emerge from that capability.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing

🛠 Building Internal Tools for LBA

Lifestyle Business Academy is the first major domain for this role.

A typical project might be:

• turning a coach workflow from Notion / Sheets / Slack into a simple internal tool
• giving the coaching team a better view of student progress
• building a dashboard that shows which students are stuck, slipping, or ready for more support
• making it easier for coaches to find the right student context before a call
• creating small AI tools that help coaches give better feedback faster
• fixing annoying admin workflows that currently take humans too long

The standard is not “enterprise software”. The standard is: does this save time, improve decisions, and make the team say, “oh wow, this is actually useful”?

🤖 Building AI-Assisted Coach Quality Systems

A big part of LBA’s future is better coaching quality and better student outcomes.

You might build systems that:

• ingest call notes, transcripts, Slack messages, scorecards, or support data
• identify examples of great coaching
• flag places where students may be drifting or not getting enough support
• surface possible coaching-quality deviations for review
• summarise what a coach or Student Success lead needs to know before a 1:1
• turn messy student data into clear next actions

This is not about replacing human coaches. It’s about giving the humans a better cockpit to help them serve our students better.

📊 Keeping Data Pipelines and Dashboards Reliable

We have more data than most small education businesses: student progress, applications, scorecards, Slack activity, calls, support tickets, revenue, funnels, and product usage, and a dozen other things.

Your job will include making sure that data becomes useful, reliable, and visible.

Examples:

• audit existing data flows and fix fragile bits
• build simple “what broke?” monitors for non-technical users
• improve dashboards for LBA, sales, student success, and operations
• connect APIs and automate recurring workflows
• make sure important data ends up in the right place without humans needing to remember

⚡ Shipping Fast With AI

You should be extremely comfortable using AI tools to move faster.

Not in a vague “I use ChatGPT sometimes” way.

I mean: using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT, agents, scripts, APIs, and whatever else helps you ship better software faster.

This role is perfect for someone who thinks in terms of:

• “I can prototype that in the next hour.”
• “Let’s build a tiny version and put it in front of coaches this week.”
• “This workflow is dumb. I can automate 95% of it.”
• “The AI output is okay, but the product needs better taste.”
• “I’m sure there’s an API for this, I’ll figure it out and come up with a plan in the next 5 mins”

🧑‍💻 Building Student- and Viewer-Facing Tools

A big part of this role is building products used not just by our team, but by our students and audience — tools that could reach millions of free users and tens of thousands of paying customers.

Possible examples:

• AI-guided niche selection
• offer builders
• warm outreach trackers / mini CRMs
• discovery call feedback tools
• weekly scorecards and progress dashboards
• AI tutors trained on our curriculum
• course-specific tools for YouTuber Academy, LifeOS, email marketing, LinkedIn, sales calls, and future products
• eventually, a broader Academy platform that replaces parts of our current stitched-together tool stack

Both matter.

Sometimes the highest-leverage win is making the internal machine better; sometimes it’s shipping a student- or viewer-facing tool that delights huge numbers of users.

Often the best internal tools and workflows become student-facing products where it makes sense.

What We’re Looking For

You might be a great fit if you are:

• A fast full-stack builder — you can ship useful web apps, dashboards, integrations, and internal tools without needing a large team.
• AI-native — you use AI tools deeply and naturally to code, debug, research, refactor, analyse data, and move faster.
• Product-minded — you care about whether the thing is actually useful, not just whether the code works.
• Ops-aware — messy real-world workflows don’t scare you. You can talk to non-technical people, understand what they’re trying to do, and turn that into software.
• High-agency — if something is unclear, you find out. If something is broken, you investigate. If something needs doing, you don’t wait for six meetings.
• Comfortable with ambiguity — we won’t always know the perfect spec. Often the work is to find the spec by building v1.
• Good with people — you’ll be talking to coaches, ops people, and team members, not hiding in a corner.
• Tasteful — you care about making things simple, useful, and nice to use, even for internal tools.
• Trustworthy — you’ll be working around sensitive student, business, and internal data. Judgment and discretion matter.

Technical Skills

You don’t need to match our exact stack perfectly, but you should be strong enough to learn quickly.

Useful skills include:

• TypeScript / JavaScript
• React / Next.js
• Node.js
• Python for scripts, data work, and automation
• SQL / Postgres / Supabase
• API integrations and webhooks
• authentication and permissions
• basic DevOps, deployments, logs, cron jobs, and monitoring
• data pipelines and dashboards
• Slack / Notion / Google Workspace / Stripe / CRM integrations
• comfort working with LLM APIs and AI agent workflows

If you’ve built polished internal tools, dashboards, AI products, SaaS prototypes, ops automations, or scrappy full-stack products before, that’s a strong signal.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a pure backend role.

This is not a pure frontend role.

This is not a corporate engineering role where every task is neatly scoped by a PM.

This is not a “research AI tools and write a memo” role.

This is not a role for someone who needs a large engineering team, a perfect spec, and a six-month roadmap before they can ship.

And it’s not a role for someone who wants to build beautiful architecture in isolation while the actual users keep struggling with the workflow.

There will be ambiguity. The job is to create clarity by building.

What Success Looks Like

After the first few months, success might look like:

• Coaches are using at least one new internal tool every week because it genuinely saves them time.
• The team has a clearer cockpit for coach quality, student health, and where support is needed.
• One or two painful Notion / Sheets / Slack workflows have been replaced with simple software which we’re piloting to our live students.
• The team has better visibility into what is happening in LBA.
• Data pipelines are more reliable, and non-technical people can see when something breaks.
• Ali is less of a bottleneck for internal tools and software decisions.
• There is a clear roadmap from internal tools toward the eventual student-facing Academy platform.
• People around the business keep saying some version of: “Can we get [name] to build a small thing for this?” because you have become the person who turns friction into software.

Why This Could Be Career-Defining

This is a rare role because you’ll be close to the centre of a bootstrapped, multimillion dollar creator-led education/software business with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of upside.

You won’t be one engineer among hundreds.

You’ll be the ONE person sitting inside the business, seeing the problems directly, and turning them into software that’s used by a dozen team members, thousands of paying customers, and hopefully millions of free users around the world.

You’ll get to work across:

• AI tooling
• internal ops
• education products
• student success
• data systems
• creator-led growth
• student-facing SaaS/platform products

If you’re entrepreneurial, AI-native, and love building useful things quickly, this could become a very high-leverage role.

How to Apply

Please complete this application form to apply.

If we think you’re a good fit, we’ll be in touch with next steps 🙂