Founding Applied ML Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Founding Applied ML Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $130,000–$250,000 + 0%–4% equity

An early-stage, venture-backed company building the optimization platform for agentic commerce — helping ecommerce and retail brands understand, improve, and monetize how their products show up across AI shopping agents. Growing 50% month over month, the team works directly with brands navigating the shift from traditional search to AI agent-driven discovery.

Founded 2025 · 1–10 people · Industry: AI Tools

Engineer number one. You are not joining an engineering team — you are helping build one. The role spans product engineering across the full stack plus applied ML judgment to build reliable AI systems: ranking systems, evals, attribution models, agents, and automation loops that customers actually trust. You will work directly with customers, own product and infrastructure decisions, and help shape what gets built and how as the market evolves in real time.

What you'll be doing

• Build custom ML models to classify prompts, predict opportunity, and prioritize what brands should optimize for
• Design and ship ranking, scoring, and evaluation systems for noisy AI commerce outputs
• Build incrementality and attribution systems that connect AI visibility to revenue outcomes
• Develop data pipelines to collect signals and turn them into usable product intelligence
• Move between modeling, analysis, implementation, and product decisions without waiting for direction
• Own core AI workflows and make them reliable with queues, retries, observability, evals, and orchestration

Tech stack: Python, SQL; TypeScript, Express, React for full-stack / customer-facing work when needed

• 3+ years applied ML or data science in production
• Full-stack Python and SQL, ship independently
• Ranking, attribution, forecasting, or product analytics experience a strong plus
• Expert with Claude, Cursor, or similar AI tools daily
• End-to-end ownership mindset, comfortable with ambiguity

• Founding engineer or early-stage startup background
• Shipped ML systems from research to production at real scale
• Ecommerce, marketplace, or search background
• Active outside work: personal projects, contributions, or published work in ML

• Pure academic or research background with no production deployment
• ML expertise but no full-stack or infrastructure depth
• No evidence of strong judgment with AI tools or uses them as a crutch to avoid thinking
• Prefers defined scope or traditional management structure

• True founding scope — engineer #1, owning product and infrastructure decisions end to end
• Novel, product-grounded ML problems: ranking, evals, attribution, and agentic workflows
• Fast-growing team working directly with customers in a market evolving in real time

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: On-site (in-person)
• Compensation: $130,000–$250,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: None Available
• Employment type: Full-time