Member of Technical Staff

Contrario is hiring its fifth engineer to help scale the AI-native recruiting marketplace that matches talent across hundreds of high-growth startups. As a Member of Technical Staff, you will work directly with the founders to build the intelligent search, retrieval, and automation systems at the heart of the platform. This is a high-ownership, full-stack opportunity to shape technical architecture and engineering culture while solving genuinely hard AI problems in a fast-growing environment.

What youll do

• Design and implement intelligent search, retrieval, and recommendation systems that power core marketplace matching.
• Build ML-driven ranking and retrieval systems using embeddings, structured signals, and behavioral data.
• Ship full-stack product features end-to-end, from database schema and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
• Develop AI-native automation workflows that help recruiters source faster and companies evaluate talent more efficiently.
• Own core marketplace infrastructure, including recruiter routing, candidate evaluation pipelines, and coordination systems.
• Launch features quickly, gather real user feedback, and iterate rapidly.

What Contrario is looking for

• 1–3 years of software engineering experience with meaningful exposure to AI or ML systems.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python across frontend and backend development.
• Solid understanding of AI/ML concepts with hands-on comfort using LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval pipelines.
• Experience designing APIs and working with relational databases such as Postgres; familiarity with AWS RDS is a plus.
• Product-minded builder who cares deeply about UX and ships systems that users genuinely love.
• High ownership mentality with the ability to independently turn ambiguous problems into working systems.
• Comfort moving fast in an early-stage startup environment.
• Experience with marketplace products, search, or recommendation systems is a plus.