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