Candle

Relationships are the single greatest predictor of long-term health and happiness. We know this from 85 years of Harvard research. And yet there's no product category dedicated to helping people actually build better ones. Candle is changing that. We're the world’s first relationship fitness app, doing for relationship health what workout apps did for physical fitness. We help couples build stronger, more intentional relationships through daily habits, play, rituals, and check-ins that actually matter. We crossed 1 million users and $1M ARR in the first 6 months, now over $3M in annual run rate. And we're just getting started. The Role We're looking for a Growth Lead to own Candle's creator program, UGC engine, and creator community, and help us scale paid social across TikTok and Meta. Candle is a product couples love and talk about. The content writes itself. Your job is to build the infrastructure that turns that energy into a compounding acquisition machine, and then run it with real accountability to views, trial starts, and DAU targets. You'll manage a Discord community of 100+ creators across multiple countries, grow the roster, and build the systems that make the whole thing operate at scale. You'll work directly with the founders. This is one of the most important hires we're making this year. What You'll Own Creator Program & UGC Pipeline Own Candle's creator program end-to-end. Develop sourcing strategy, creator personas, and tier structure across markets. Write briefs and scripts that get results. Build the workflows, agreements, payments, feedback cycles, iteration loops, that let us run a high-volume creator operation without things slipping. Creator Community (Discord) Manage and grow our Discord community of 100+ creators. Keep the roster engaged, informed, and producing. Run challenges, feedback loops, and incentive structures that maintain quality and volume at scale. Identify top performers and build them up. Cull what isn't working. International Creator Growth Expand the creator roster across new markets and demographics in Spain, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Korea and Japan. Understand how couple content performs differently across regions and adapt briefing, tone, and formats accordingly. Build systems that let strong ideas travel from one market to another. Creative Strategy and Viral Sense, You watch five pieces of couple content and immediately know which one will perform and why. You develop winning formats, identify hook patterns, and brief with specificity Paid Social Own or co-own Candle's paid social on Meta and TikTok. Campaign structure, Spark Ads, whitelisting, audience strategy, budget allocation. You treat creative as the primary variable and manage it accordingly. Performance & Targets Work alongside the founders to see what drives views, trial starts, installs, CPI, DAU contribution by channel. You run a clean weekly report to get the best creatives each week. You know why something worked and double down. Reporting & Optimization You'll track what matters: CPM, CTR, install rate, creative performance by format and creator. What We're Looking For You've built or scaled a UGC or creator program at a consumer app, owned it and scaled, not assisted You've managed a creator community or large roster (Discord, Slack, or similar) and kept it high-functioning at volume You understand creative performance natively: hooks, retention curves, platform culture, format iteration for Tik tok and IG You can operate across markets and adapt strategy without losing executional rigor Strong analytical instincts, cohort data, funnel conversion, creative performance Bonus: Comfortable in Meta Ads Manager and/or TikTok Ads Manager Bonus: experience in relationships, wellness, health, fitness, or lifestyle consumer apps Strong Signals You've run a creator roster of 20+ partners and can speak to what made it work You've driven measurable growth through UGC, downloads, signups, revenue, or engagement You

What You’ll Do Own core surfaces. Design and evolve the heart of the Candle experience. This includes the daily challenges, streaks, games, onboarding, discovery, notifications, and more. Think in systems. Craft emotional loops, streak mechanics, reward systems, and connection rituals that drive daily engagement. Ship end-to-end. From concept → prototype → polished UI → shipped feature. You’ll work directly with founders and engineers to bring ideas live fast. Invent new formats, design to market Design new interaction patterns for connection and marketing: collaborative canvases, async voice, micro-games, emotional check-ins, rituals, etc. Obsess over details. Typography, motion, haptics, micro-interactions, empty states, streak animations, the small things matter here a lot. Every pixel is questioned. What We’re Looking For 2+ years designing and shipping consumer mobile products A portfolio that shows taste, restraint, and strong interaction thinking Deep understanding of mobile UX patterns and emotional design Strong Figma skills (components, systems, prototyping) Ability to prototype interactive flows (bonus: React Native, SwiftUI, Framer, ProtoPie, etc.) High product intuition, you can think like a PM when needed You care about user psychology Bonus if: You’ve worked on social, gaming, or habit-forming products You’ve built and shipped your own app Have done animations with Rive Why This Is Different You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 ) Your work will be seen by hundreds of thousands within days We ship fast, experiments go live weekly We care deeply about emotional impact, not vanity metrics You’ll help define the design language of a generational consumer brand If you want to design something people use every single day with someone they love, this is that opportunity.

What You’ll Do Ship fast: Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours. Scale infra: Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions Optimize performance: Identify bottlenecks, improve reliability, and make Candle feel seamless at scale. Bring perspective: You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 ), contributing new ideas and white boarding solutions to hard problems. User impact: Every line of code directly affects couples and friends relying on Candle to stay close and stay in touch.  Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notification jobs into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful!), etc. Technologies We Use: React Native (Expo) and SwiftUI for the client facing app (iOS and Android) Convex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.6), OpenAI (GPT 5.2), and Gemini models to create background agents for tasks like finding local date ideas. We also use Replicate for some image gen models. Observability: PostHog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting Clerk for user auth(z/n) We strongly encourage all candidates to have their own AI setup of choice when coding (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to ship faster. Bonus points if you know how to use Git worktrees to speed up your workflow! Who We're Looking For: You're a student (or recent grad) excited by viral consumer products and fast shipping cycles You have strong experience with TypeScript and mobile frameworks like React Native (Expo). Swift is optional but a plus! You get excited by both backend optimization and user-facing polish, whether you’re speeding up a backend query or refining a feature’s UX  You’re curious, self-driven, and relentlessly resourceful Entrepreneurial background, have shipped and published apps before (optional but preferred) You want your work to matter, to be visible, felt, and loved by users within hours of writing it We work hybrid in San Francisco, 3 days a week in person and the remaining remotely. You’ll move fast in this internship, break things, and learn more in a few months than most people do in a year. But if you’re the kind of builder who dreams of taking a product from 800k → 5M users by end of 2026, this will be one of the most exciting chapters of your career.