Founding Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage advertising technology team building real-time ad recommendations for interactive AI and gaming experiences. As a founding engineer, you will own core systems spanning data, machine learning, and production serving, helping shape how ads are selected and personalized at scale.

What You'll Do

• Design and ship low-latency retrieval, ranking, and reranking systems that select campaigns and creatives while balancing advertiser performance with user experience.

• Build data pipelines and feature infrastructure for continuous model training across clicks, installs, and conversions.

• Develop user and context representations using engagement history, conversational signals, and session context.

• Build cost-efficient serving infrastructure that delivers ads with sub-second latency.

• Create generative agents that produce playable and video ad variations and feed performance signals back into recommendations.

What We're Looking For

• Early-career experience, with 0 to 3 years in software engineering, machine learning, or a related area.

• Experience shipping at least one machine learning or AI system to production.

• Ability to build data architecture, feature pipelines, and serving infrastructure end to end, beyond model development alone.

• Experience with recommendation systems, ranking, or advertising technology, and familiarity with PyTorch.

• Strong backend, machine learning, and infrastructure skills, demonstrated through shipped work or active projects.

• Startup experience, initiative, and comfort owning ambiguous problems; mentoring or leading other engineers is a plus.

• Interest in gaming, including experience with mobile games, reward ads, or game development such as HTML5 or playable builds.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $250,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week.