Founding AI Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

A fast-growing, AI-first consumer social platform is hiring a Founding AI Engineer to join its core team in San Francisco. The company uses AI agents to facilitate real-world, in-person social connections — organizing curated small-group hangouts for young people, with a growing presence across university campuses in the US. The platform operates entirely through AI: matching, logistics, reminders, follow-ups, and continuous learning, all without a traditional app.

As a founding engineer, you will own two mission-critical pillars of the product and have an outsized impact on the direction of the technology.

What You'll Do

AI Matching & Social Graphs

• Build a new type of social graph grounded in real-world interaction data

• Match people into highly compatible groups and surface patterns that drive meaningful friendships

• Work with millions of data points using collaborative filtering and graph intelligence

• Develop and iterate on embeddings, ranking systems, and large-scale personalization

• Apply reinforcement learning informed by real-world outcomes

Communication Workflows & AI Agent Experience

• Design and build AI agent experiences across channels where users already are (e.g. Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, TikTok)

• Orchestrate multi-channel agent workflows connecting APIs, third-party services, and the database layer

• Build scalable infrastructure to support complex, multi-step AI workflows

• Own human-AI interaction design for a seamless, natural user experience

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 4–10+ years of experience building AI/ML systems in production

• Comfort working across the full stack — from data pipelines to user-facing agent interactions

• Familiarity with multi-channel messaging APIs and agent frameworks

• Founding mindset: you ship fast, own problems end-to-end, and thrive in ambiguity

Nice to Have:

• Experience with recommendation systems, social graphs, or large-scale personalization

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually

• Equity: Meaningful founding-level equity

• Early-stage opportunity with significant upside in a growing consumer tech company

Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Location

This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, California. The team works together in person.