Job description
ABOUT THE ROLE
A well-funded, stealth-stage consumer tech startup is building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform — helping people figure out where to go, what to do, and who to go with. The company has assembled one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events (200M+ places, millions of events) and is now building an intelligent, social product experience on top of it.
They're looking for a Founding Engineer to join on-site in San Francisco. This is a rare opportunity to shape core systems and product from the ground up alongside the founding team.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Design and ship product features and backend systems from zero to production
- Work directly with founders on product direction and architecture decisions
- Own end-to-end problems — not just contribute to them
- Move fluidly across the stack: frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI Example problems you might work on:
- Ranking what someone should do tonight using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
- Pushing Elasticsearch + vector search to sub-100ms latency across massive datasets
- Building real-time systems (chat, presence, location) that feel genuinely instantaneous
- Designing map display algorithms that surface what deserves attention
- Building agent pipelines that plan queries and synthesize well-informed answers
- Structuring unstructured web data to power novel discovery experiences AREAS OF FOCUS Most engineers here won't fit neatly into one track — and that's the point. Application Engineer (Full-Stack)
- Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile (iOS/Android) and web
- Own features end-to-end from UI through backend
- Work deeply on rendering performance and interaction design
- Stack: 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
- Work with LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval/recommendation systems
- Stack: Python and/or TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required: - 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience
- Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate — on-site presence is required
- Eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
- Proven experience building real-time and/or low-latency systems
- Proficiency in search and ranking algorithms and systems
- Experience with data processing pipelines, data engineering, or ML/AI workflows
- Experience with infrastructure and performance optimization for production environments
- Prior early-stage startup experience; comfortable operating with high ambiguity
- Ability to collaborate across product, design, and engineering with full end-to-end ownership
- Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills in fast-paced environments Strong signals (not hard requirements):
- You've built something technically ambitious end-to-end
- You have exceptional problem-solving ability — systems, math, or both
- You move fast and don't need much structure to do great work
- You care about taste — not just whether something works, but how it feels This role is not a fit if you:
- Prefer clearly scoped, structured tasks
- Are a single-domain specialist unwilling to stretch across the stack
- Require a remote arrangement COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually (depending on experience)
- Early equity in a well-funded, high-conviction consumer AI startup
- Direct impact on product, architecture, and company direction from day one LOCATION
- San Francisco, CA — on-site required
- Relocation considered for exceptional candidates
- No visa sponsorship available; must be authorized to work in the United States