Founding Engineer

About the role

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