Founding Engineer

About the Role

Join a well-funded (Series A/B), stealth-stage consumer tech startup building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform. The product helps people figure out where to go and what to do — combining one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events with a clever, social product experience.

As a Founding Engineer, you'll own problems end-to-end, work directly with founders, and make architectural decisions that shape the core system. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast.

What You'll Work On

• Search and ranking at massive scale (200M+ places, millions of events)

• Recommendations and personalization of places and events using embeddings, structured data, and social signals

• Real-time infrastructure — chat, presence, and location systems that feel instantaneous

• AI agent pipelines that plan, retrieve, and reason over diverse data sources

• Map display algorithms that determine what deserves attention

• Data pipelines that structure large volumes of unstructured web data for novel product experiences

• Pushing Elasticsearch and vector search to sub-100ms latency across large datasets

Engineering Tracks

You don't need to fit neatly into one area — most people here won't.

Application Engineer (Full-Stack)

• Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile and web

• Own features end-to-end from UI to backend

• Tools: 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

• Tools: Python, TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, retrieval and recommendation systems

What We're Looking For

• 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience

• Proven experience building real-time or low-latency production systems

• Proficiency in search, ranking algorithms, and related infrastructure

• Experience with data processing pipelines, ML/AI workflows, or data engineering

• Track record of infrastructure and performance optimization at scale

• Prior experience at early-stage startups; comfortable operating with high ambiguity

• Ability to own features end-to-end with cross-functional collaboration (product, design, engineering)

• Strong problem-solving and fast decision-making in fast-paced environments

• You care about how something feels, not just whether it works

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually

• Equity as a founding team member

Location

• San Francisco, CA — on-site required

• Candidates must be located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco

• No visa sponsorship available — must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship