Quick overview
Job description
About the Role
Join a small, early-stage team building an advertising technology platform. As Founding Engineer, you will own and develop the production recommendation system, with impact across data, machine learning, and real-time ad delivery.
What You'll Do
Design and ship a low-latency ad ranking system that selects campaigns and creative for each opportunity while balancing advertiser performance and user experience.
Build data pipelines and feature infrastructure for ongoing model training across signals such as clicks, installs, and conversions.
Model user behavior and context using engagement history, conversational data, and signals such as geography, device, and session activity.
Develop efficient ad-serving infrastructure designed for sub-second latency and cost-conscious operation.
Build generative agents that create playable and video ad variants, and feed their performance back into the recommendation system.
What We're Looking For
Typically 0 to 3 years of experience, with demonstrated ability to own substantial engineering work.
Experience shipping an ML or AI system to production, ideally owning the full path from data pipelines and model training through serving.
Strong backend, data infrastructure, and production serving skills, including experience with systems operating at significant scale.
Ability to reason from first principles and work across infrastructure, classical machine learning, and AI agents.
Experience with recommendation systems, ranking, advertising technology, or consumer products is useful; gaming interest and experience with playable ads are also valued.
PyTorch experience and an active GitHub profile or shipped side projects demonstrating technical work are welcome.
Must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and able to work on-site in San Francisco five days per week.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $200,000 to $250,000 annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States, five days per week.