Founding Engineer

About this role

Join a well-funded Series A/B stealth startup as a Founding Engineer to build an AI-powered map and social discovery platform. You'll own end-to-end technical problems spanning search, recommendations, real-time infrastructure, and AI agents across hundreds of millions of places and events.

What you'll do

• Build search and ranking systems for 200M+ places and millions of events at scale
• Design recommendation and personalization features using embeddings and social signals
• Develop real-time infrastructure for chat, presence, and location systems
• Create AI agent pipelines for planning and reasoning over diverse data
• Optimize Elasticsearch and vector search to sub-100ms latency
• Build data pipelines to structure large-scale unstructured web data

What they're looking for

• Full-stack development (TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android) or Data/AI engineering (Python, Elasticsearch, Snowflake)
• Search and ranking algorithms
• Real-time and low-latency systems
• Data processing pipelines and ML workflows
• Infrastructure and performance optimization
• LLMs and embedding systems
• Early-stage startup experience
• Cross-functional collaboration

Benefits

• Salary: $150,000–$250,000 USD annually
• Equity as a founding team member
• High ownership and direct work with founders
• Architectural decision-making authority
• Fast-paced, high-impact environment