Founding AI Engineer

About Yirl

Yirl runs AI-powered small group hangouts every Saturday afternoon so people can turn off their screens, meet likeminded people and make new friends IRL. Our AI agents handle everything end-to-end: onboarding, profiling, matching, logistics, reminders, follow-ups, and continuous learning. Thousands of young people already meet through Yirl every month, and we are expanding across hundreds of university campuses in the US.

No app. No swiping. No ghosting. Just real hangouts, every Saturday.

The Role

We are looking for a founding engineer to join our core team in San Francisco. You will work across two critical areas that power everything Yirl does:

AI Matching and Social Graphs

Build a new type of social graph based on real-world interactions. Match people into highly compatible groups and discover patterns that lead to meaningful friendships, working with millions of data points across our growing user base.

• Collaborative filtering and graph intelligence
• Embeddings and ranking systems
• Reinforcement learning from real-world outcomes
• Large-scale personalization

Communication Workflows and AI Agent Experience

Our AI agents live where users already are: Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, TikTok. You will design and build agent experiences that feel natural, reliable, and effortless across every channel, connecting APIs, third-party services, our 9 AI agents, and the database layer.

• Multi-channel agent orchestration
• Scalable infrastructure
• Complex AI workflows
• Human-AI interaction design

What We Are Looking For

• Deep experience building AI/ML systems in production
• Comfort working across the full stack, from data pipelines to user-facing agent interactions
• Experience with recommendation systems, social graphs, or large-scale personalization is a strong plus
• Familiarity with multi-channel messaging APIs and agent frameworks
• Founding mindset: you ship fast, own problems end-to-end, and thrive in ambiguity

Why Yirl

• AI-first company solving a real human problem: loneliness among Gen Z
• Thousands of friendships made every month, expanding to hundreds of US campuses
• Early-stage with significant equity upside
• In-person team in San Francisco
• Competitive salary ($150k+) plus founding equity