Founding AI Engineer

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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.

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