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