Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

In-Person — San Francisco

Gobi is an AI-powered map and messaging product that helps people figure out where to go and what to do with their friends. We imagine a future where Gobi is the app that people use to connect with the real world and the people that matter to them.

Gobi is well funded (in stealth) by top-tier firms and operators. Our team has built legendary, industry-defining products in consumer before.

We’ve built one of the largest structured indices of everywhere (places) and everything happening (events) in the real world. Now, we’re building a clever, social product experience around that index.

Solve problems like this

• Search + ranking at massive scale (200M+ places, millions of events)
• Recommendations + personalization of places + events
• Real-time infra (chat, presence, location)
• AI systems that plan, retrieve, and reason over a multitude of data sources

If you’re excited by systems that sit at the intersection of infra, product, and AI — this is your kind of place.

🔧 The Role

You’ll operate as a founding engineer, owning problems end-to-end.

You will

• Design and ship product + systems from zero → production
• Work directly with founders on product and architecture
• Make decisions that shape the core system (not just contribute to it)
• Move across the stack as needed — frontend, backend, infra, AI

Example problems you might work on

• Ranking what someone should do tonight using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
• Pushing Elasticsearch + vector search to sub-100ms across large datasets
• Building real-time systems that actually feel instantaneous
• Designing map display algorithms that decide what deserves attention
• Building agent pipelines that plan queries and synthesize well-informed answers
• Structuring mountains of invaluable unstructured information on the web to power novel experiences

🧠 Areas of Focus

You don’t need to fit neatly into one — most people here won’t.

Application Engineers (Full-stack)

• Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile + web
• Work deeply on rendering performance and interaction design
• Own features end-to-end (UI → backend)

Typical tools

• TypeScript, React
• React Native / iOS / Android
• Backend systems in TypeScript

Data / AI Engineers

• Build the intelligence layer behind Gobi
• 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 + recommendation systems

🧬 What We Look For

We don’t optimize for resumes. We optimize for slope.

Strong signals

• You’ve built something technically ambitious end-to-end
• You have 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 / math (IOI, IMO, USAMO, ICPC)
• Early engineers at high-bar companies
• Really green github contribution charts

None of this is required — it’s just correlated.

🚫 What This Is Not

• Not a role where you maintain legacy systems
• Not a role with tightly scoped tickets
• Not a role where product is decided for you

If you thrive best with clear boundaries and predictable work, this won’t be a fit.

🚀 Why Gobi

• Real problems — search, maps, AI, and social systems combined
• Small, technical team — everyone ships, including the founders
• High ownership — you can ship meaningful work in days
• Massive surface area — infra, product, and AI all in one system
• Trajectory — the kind of place future founders come from