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