Founding Engineer: Consumer Mobile (React Native)

About the Role

You'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.

The company has built one of the largest structured indices of places and events in the real world, and is now building a social product experience around that index.

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 For

We 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