Founding AI Engineer

Join the core team of an early-stage consumer social startup redefining how young people make friends in real life. The company runs AI-powered small group hangouts every week, matching people into compatible groups and handling everything end-to-end — onboarding, profiling, matching, logistics, reminders, and follow-ups — through a suite of AI agents. Thousands of users connect every month, and the platform is rapidly expanding across university campuses across the US.

As a Founding AI Engineer, you will be one of the earliest technical hires, shaping the architecture and direction of the AI systems that power the entire product.

What You'll DO

• AI Matching & Social Graphs

• Build a novel social graph grounded in real-world interaction data, processing millions of data points

• Design and improve matching systems that group users into highly compatible cohorts

• Develop collaborative filtering, graph embeddings, and ranking systems

• Apply reinforcement learning from real-world outcomes to continuously improve personalization

• Discover patterns and signals that lead to meaningful, lasting friendships

• Communication Workflows & AI Agent Orchestration

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

• Orchestrate a multi-agent system handling the full user lifecycle from onboarding to follow-up

• Integrate third-party APIs and messaging services into reliable, scalable workflows

• Contribute to human-AI interaction design to make agent experiences feel natural and effortless

What We're Looking FOR

• Required: Hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production (0–4+ years), ideally in recommender systems, matching, or social graph domains

• Experience processing and modeling at scale (millions of data points)

• Proficiency in collaborative filtering, graph embeddings, and ranking systems

• Experience with reinforcement learning applied to real-world personalization

• Familiarity with multi-channel messaging APIs and AI agent frameworks

• Ability to design scalable infrastructure supporting complex AI workloads

• Strong cross-functional communication skills; comfortable working alongside product, design, and data science

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

• Note: Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Compensation & Benefits

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

• Significant founding equity

• Opportunity to shape the technical direction of a fast-growing consumer AI company

LOCATION

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