Founding Engineer
$150,000–$250,000 year
On-site · San Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Founding Engineer will own problems end-to-end, work directly with founders, and make architectural decisions that shape the core system. This high-ownership, high-impact role involves building search and ranking at massive scale, real-time infrastructure for chat/presence/location, AI agent pipelines, map-display algorithms, and data pipelines to structure large volumes of unstructured data. The role encompasses two engineering tracks: Application Engineer (Full-Stack) focused on UI-to-backend features using TypeScript, React/React Native, iOS/Android; and Data/AI Engineer focused on the intelligence layer with Python, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval/recommendation systems. The position requires 0–5 years of software engineering experience, experience with real-time or low-latency systems, and a track record of working on infrastructure and performance at scale. Ownership of features end-to-end and cross-functional collaboration are emphasized. Compensation ranges from $150,000 to $250,000 USD annually, plus equity as a founding team member.
Required Qualifications
- 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
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