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