About the RoleYou'll operate as a founding engineer, owning problems end-to-end. This is an in-person role in San Francisco working on an AI-powered map and messaging product that helps people discover places and events, and connect with friends.
What You'll Do- Design and ship product and systems from zero to production
- Work directly with founders on product and architecture decisions
- Make decisions that shape core systems, not just contribute to them
- Move across the stack as needed - frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI
Example problems you might work on:- Ranking recommendations using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
- Optimizing search and vector operations to sub-100ms latency across large datasets
- Building real-time systems for chat, presence, and location features
- Designing map display algorithms that determine what deserves attention
- Building AI agent pipelines that plan queries and synthesize informed answers
- Structuring unstructured web data to power novel experiences
Areas of Focus:Application Engineers (Full-stack): Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile and web. Work on rendering performance and interaction design. Own features end-to-end from UI to backend. Typical tools: TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android, backend systems in TypeScript.
Data / AI Engineers: Build the intelligence layer behind the product. Work on search, ranking, pipelines, and agent systems. Design systems that operate 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 ForWe optimize for slope, not resumes.
Strong signals:- 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 if something works, but how it feels
- You like hard, ambiguous problems
Backgrounds we often see:- Competitive programming or advanced mathematics background
- Early engineers at high-bar companies
- Strong open source contributions
None of this is required - these are just correlated signals.
This is not:- A role maintaining legacy systems
- A role with tightly scoped tickets
- A role where product is decided for you
If you thrive best with clear boundaries and predictable work, this won't be a fit.
Compensation & DetailsIn-person role in San Francisco.
