Founding Engineer

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform that helps people figure out where to go and what to do with the people that matter to them. We've assembled one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events, and we're now building a clever, social product experience around it.

We're looking for a Founding Engineer to join us on-site in San Francisco. This is a high-ownership, zero-bureaucracy role where you'll work directly with the founding team and shape the architecture, product, and culture from day one.

Problems you'll work on include:

- Search & ranking at massive scale (hundreds of millions of places, millions of events)

- Recommendations and personalization of places and events

- Real-time infrastructure (chat, presence, location)

- AI systems that plan, retrieve, and reason over diverse data sources

If you're excited by systems that sit at the intersection of infra, product, and AI — this is your kind of place.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and ship product features and systems from zero to production

- Work directly with founders on product direction and architecture

- Make decisions that shape the core system — not just contribute to it

- Move fluidly across the stack: frontend, backend, infra, and AI

Example problems:

- Ranking what someone should do tonight using embeddings, structured data, and social signals

- Pushing Elasticsearch + vector search to sub-100ms latency across large datasets

- Building real-time systems that feel instantaneous

- Designing map display algorithms that decide what deserves visual attention

- Building agent pipelines that plan queries and synthesize well-informed answers

- Structuring large volumes of unstructured web data to power novel discovery experiences

We're open across two tracks — most people here won't fit neatly into just one:

- Application (Full-Stack): Fast, expressive interfaces across mobile + web; deep focus on rendering performance and interaction design; ownership from UI to backend. Typical tools: TypeScript, React, React Native / iOS / Android.

- Data / AI: Intelligence layer — search, ranking, data pipelines, and agent systems; operating over large-scale, messy real-world data. Typical tools: Python and/or TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, retrieval and recommendation systems.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We optimize for slope, not résumé. Strong signals include:

- You've built something technically ambitious end-to-end

- Exceptional problem-solving ability — systems, math, or both

- You move fast and don't need much structure

- You care about taste — not just whether something works, but how it feels

Required:

- 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience

- Proven experience building real-time or low-latency systems

- Proficiency in search and ranking algorithms and systems

- Experience with data processing pipelines, data engineering, and ML/AI workflows

- Experience with infrastructure and performance optimization for production systems

- Prior early-stage startup experience; comfort operating in high-ambiguity environments

- Ability to own end-to-end features with multidisciplinary collaboration (product, design, engineering)

- Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills in fast-paced, ambiguous settings

- Must be eligible to work in the United States — no visa sponsorship available

- Located in San Francisco or willing to relocate; on-site presence required

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 per year

- Equity commensurate with founding-team scope

- On-site in San Francisco, CA

LOCATION

This role is fully on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate. Remote work is not available for this position.

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