San Francisco, CA | Full-Time | $250,000 to $300,000 + founding-level equity
Shopping is changing forever. Millions of purchase decisions are already being made by AI agents, not search bars, and the brands that win the next decade will be the ones that show up when an AI goes shopping. Our client, a fast-scaling San Francisco startup, sits right at the centre of that shift, helping consumer brands compete and win in AI-driven discovery.
Revenue is compounding month after month, the founders are working directly with customers, and they’re now ready to bring on a founding engineer.
The Role
This is not a seat on an engineering team. This is the role that builds one. As the founding applied ML engineer, you’ll own the intelligence at the core of the product: the ML systems that decide what surfaces, to whom, and why, across a huge volume of daily AI interactions.
You will:
- Build custom ML models that classify, predict, and prioritise at scale
- Design and ship ranking, scoring, and evaluation systems for noisy LLM outputs
- Build attribution systems that connect AI-driven activity directly to revenue
- Develop data pipelines that turn raw signals into product intelligence
- Own core AI workflows end to end: queues, retries, observability, evals, and orchestration
- Work directly with customers and shape what gets built as the market evolves in real time
Who Thrives Here
The engineers who excel in this role tend to share a few things. They’ve been founding engineers before, or they’ve felt the pull of early-stage building and want more of it. They’ve taken ML systems all the way from research to production at real scale, not just to a notebook. Many bring ecommerce, marketplace, or search backgrounds, so ranking and relevance problems feel like home turf. And they build outside work too: personal projects, open source contributions, published ML work. The kind of people who would be doing this anyway.
You’ll also be fluent with AI tools like Claude and Cursor as a daily multiplier for your own judgment, comfortable shipping full-stack Python and SQL independently, and energised rather than unsettled by ambiguity.
What’s On Offer
- $250,000 to $300,000 base plus meaningful founding-level equity
- Unlimited PTO, 401K, health insurance
- Daily lunch, company laptop, and a premium gym membership
- A genuine ground-floor seat at one of the fastest-growing startups in the AI space
Requirements: 3+ years of applied ML or data science in production. San Francisco based, full-time. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
This search is managed by Big Wave Digital, specialists in AI and machine learning recruitment. We work at the frontier of AI hiring, connecting exceptional engineers with the companies defining what comes next. If this role sounds like you, or you’d like a confidential conversation about the AI market, get in touch.
