Founding Engineer

About the Role

A well-funded, stealth-stage consumer tech startup is building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform - helping people figure out where to go, what to do, and who to go with. The company has assembled one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events (200M+ places, millions of events) and is now building an intelligent, social product experience on top of it.

They're looking for a Founding Engineer to join on-site in San Francisco. This is a rare opportunity to shape core systems and product from the ground up alongside the founding team.
What You'll Do

• Design and ship product features and backend systems from zero to production
• Work directly with founders on product direction and architecture decisions
• Own end-to-end problems - not just contribute to them
• Move fluidly across the stack: frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI

Example problems you might work on:

• Ranking what someone should do tonight using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
• Pushing Elasticsearch + vector search to sub-100ms latency across massive datasets
• Building real-time systems (chat, presence, location) that feel genuinely instantaneous
• Designing map display algorithms that surface what deserves attention
• Building agent pipelines that plan queries and synthesize well-informed answers
• Structuring unstructured web data to power novel discovery experiences

Areas of Focus

Most engineers here won't fit neatly into one track - and that's the point.

Application Engineer (Full-Stack)

• Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile (iOS/Android) and web
• Own features end-to-end from UI through backend
• Work deeply on rendering performance and interaction design
• Stack: TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android

Data / AI Engineer

• Build the intelligence layer: search, ranking, pipelines, and agent systems
• Design systems that operate over large-scale, messy real-world data
• Work with LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval/recommendation systems
• Stack: Python and/or TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 0-5 years of professional software engineering experience
• Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate - on-site presence is required
• Eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
• Proven experience building real-time and/or low-latency systems
• Proficiency in search and ranking algorithms and systems
• Experience with data processing pipelines, data engineering, or ML/AI workflows
• Experience with infrastructure and performance optimization for production environments
• Prior early-stage startup experience; comfortable operating with high ambiguity
• Ability to collaborate across product, design, and engineering with full end-to-end ownership
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills in fast-paced environments

Strong signals (not hard requirements):

• You've built something technically ambitious end-to-end
• You have exceptional problem-solving ability - systems, math, or both
• You move fast and don't need much structure to do great work
• You care about taste - not just whether something works, but how it feels

This role is not a fit if you:

• Prefer clearly scoped, structured tasks
• Are a single-domain specialist unwilling to stretch across the stack
• Require a remote arrangement

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 - $250,000 USD annually (depending on experience)
• Early equity in a well-funded, high-conviction consumer AI startup
• Direct impact on product, architecture, and company direction from day one

Location

• San Francisco, CA - on-site required
• Relocation considered for exceptional candidates
• No visa sponsorship available; must be authorized to work in the United States