Founding Engineer (AI & Backend)

AI Engineer (Backend focused)

About the role

You'll build the AI systems that power taste evals, tooling, API and RL environments - from agent architectures and data pipelines to the product surfaces where users interact with our platform. The work skews backend (synthetic data, embeddings, crawling, evaluation systems) but you'll also ship front-end tooling and gamified experiences when needed. Early stage, high ownership, lots of building from scratch.

What you'll do

Core focus

• Design and build agent systems, evaluation pipelines, and synthetic data generation

• Create embedding and retrieval infrastructure that scales to millions of requests

• Build crawling and scraping systems for visual data across the web

• Set up inference serving and APIs for client-facing products

• Develop the tooling and infrastructure that makes everything reliable and fast

Also you

• Ship internal tools for data operations and external tools for expert annotators

• Build gamified product experiences: taste quizzes, leaderboards, reward flows

What we're looking for

• 4+ years of experience (flexible for exceptional candidates)

• Strong Python and systems design background

• Deep experience with AI/LLM systems: agent flows, context engineering, embeddings, index building, RAG

• Comfortable with web scraping, data extraction, and large-scale data processing

• Experience with cloud infrastructure and CI/CD

What actually matters to us

• Startup DNA: You've built at early-stage companies (pre-seed to Series C) and operate well in ambiguity

• Real AI building experience: You've shipped agent systems, built with LLMs, and understand the craft - whether through your job, open source, or serious personal projects.

• Genuine curiosity about taste: This problem is hard, nuanced and undefined. You find that energizing, not frustrating.

• Creative problem-solving: We're not optimizing existing systems. We're inventing infrastructure for something that doesn't exist yet.

Bonus points

• Open source contributions

• Background at creative companies (Figma, Notion, Canva, Adobe, Runway, etc.) or companies with strong index building/crawling (e.g. Parallel Web Systems, Firecrawl, Brave, Luma, Pika).

• Personal projects that show you build things because you're curious