Founding Engineer - Machine Learning / Search

Plush is an AI-powered fashion search engine and shopping assistant that actually understands style. Describe what you want—“a romantic dress for a beach wedding in Ibiza,” or “a blazer with The Row vibe but under $700”—and Plush shows you curated, shoppable results in seconds. Think of it as talking to a stylist who truly gets you.

We’re a small, fast-growing, VC-backed startup reshaping how people discover fashion online. Our founding team includes two former DoorDash and Airbnb product leaders, data scientists and engineers, who are also fashion influencers and photographers. Plush launched in 2024 and has already gained meaningful traction, with tens of thousands of high-intent users and strong early revenue traction.

As our founding ML/search engineer, you will help improve our core search functionality, build personalized discovery systems, and enable a real-time, chat-based personal stylist that understands user intent and returns highly curated, shoppable results.

• Improving our hybrid search systems: Combine keyword and semantic search to surface the most relevant fashion results—balancing relevance, diversity, personalization, and business priorities (e.g., store boosting).
• Building ML systems that learn user preferences: Tailor search results—surface brands they love, styles that match their event or mood, and pieces that complete an outfit based on their browsing and purchase history.
• Exploring social discovery features: Power community-driven recommendations and enhance product discovery (e.g., “people with similar taste loved this” or “you and your friend share a love for minimalist tailoring”).
• Establishing evaluation pipelines: Measure and improve search and LLM performance—tracking relevance, coverage, latency, and output quality.

• 3 years of experience working on machine learning, search, and recommendation systems.
• Comfortable designing both quick prototypes and scalable infrastructure.
• Strong product intuition and care about what users experience.
• High ownership, clear communication, and thrive in fast-moving environments.
• Genuine interest in fashion and how people discover what to wear.
• Authorized to work in the U.S. or Canada and can work within U.S. time zones (remote-friendly within that constraint).

• Built LLM agents or RAG pipelines in production.