Founding AI Engineer

Job Description

This is a hands-on, high-ownership engineering role at an early-stage startup. There is no engineering team yet: you are the engineering team. You will build, ship, maintain, and improve the product end to end, working directly with the founders. Frontend, backend, infra, data, AI: whatever the product needs. You will start where you're strongest and grow from there. Real decisions, real consequences, fast pace. The core stack is Node.js, TypeScript, React, and Next.js on the web side, with Python for data and AI work and SQL for everything data. If your background is in another ecosystem (Rails, Elixir, Clojure, Scala, Rust, Go), that's fine: we hire for systems thinking, not syntax, and strong engineers ramp fast. What you'll own The traveler discovery experience: search, filters, property pages, booking flows The booking core: reservations, availability, calendar sync, payments Host-facing tools: onboarding, listing management, analytics AI features: guest messaging that knows the property, listing generation, natural-language trip discovery Technical direction: you help decide what gets built and how What you'll bring 2+ years shipping production software you owned end to end: product features, backend systems, or AI/LLM features in production Real depth in at least one area (product/frontend, backend and distributed systems, or data/AI) and no fear of working outside it Comfort working in TypeScript and Node, or a track record that says you'll ramp fast from another stack High comfort with ambiguity: you define the problem as often as you solve it A bias for shipping over planning, and for simplicity over cleverness