Founding Engineer

About the Role

Own and evolve the recommendation engine behind an advertising platform for AI entertainment and mobile games. This founding, full-stack role spans data pipelines, machine learning, and production serving, with direct impact on ad performance and user experience.

What You'll Do

• Design and ship a low-latency ad ranking system that selects campaigns and creative for each opportunity while balancing advertiser returns and user experience.

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

• Model user behavior using conversational signals, engagement history, and contextual information such as location, device, and session activity.

• Develop efficient serving infrastructure that meets sub-second latency requirements and tight per-impression cost targets.

• Create generative agents that produce playable and video ad variants, then feed performance data back into the recommendation engine.

What We're Looking For

• Experience appropriate to an early-career founding engineering role, with 0 to 3 years of experience.

• Shipped at least one machine learning or AI system to production, and built its data architecture, feature pipelines, and serving infrastructure end to end.

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

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

• Experience in consumer technology, ad infrastructure, or an early-stage startup is valuable.

• Interest in gaming, including mobile games and reward ads; experience building games or playable ad formats is a plus.

• Experience with AI-native products and mentoring or leading engineers is helpful.

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.