Member of Technical Staff (Founding Engineer)

Location: San Francisco, CA (North Beach)

Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage / AI Commerce Infrastructure Startup

Office Type: On-site (5 days/week in San Francisco)

Salary: $120,000 – $170,000 Base

Equity: 0.25% – 0.75%

Bonus: Competitive total compensation package

Visa: Open to visa sponsorship and relocation support (candidate must already be located in the U.S.)

Company Description

Our client is building the commerce layer for AI.

The platform enables AI agents such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other frontier models to understand, reason about, and transact with products across the real economy.

The company transforms product data into formats optimized for AI-native commerce and agent-driven shopping experiences.

Founded in 2025 and currently operating with a lean team of approximately 5 employees.

Raised $3M in seed funding and founded by operators who previously helped build Cash App Commerce and other large-scale commerce platforms.

The company sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure, ecommerce, search, retrieval systems, and agentic APIs.

Catalog partners directly with ecommerce brands and frontier AI labs to bridge the gap between traditional commerce systems and AI-native purchasing experiences.

Engineers work directly alongside founders and have significant influence on architecture, product direction, customer conversations, and company culture.

The team operates in a high-trust, high-intensity startup environment focused on rapid execution and ownership.

The company is building foundational infrastructure that could become a critical layer in the emerging AI commerce ecosystem.

What You Will Do

Build backend infrastructure powering AI-native commerce systems

Design and ship production APIs, retrieval systems, search infrastructure, and data pipelines

Build systems that enable AI agents to understand, reason about, and transact with product data

Develop embeddings pipelines, vector search architectures, recommendation systems, and information retrieval infrastructure

Own projects end-to-end from architecture and design through deployment and iteration

Collaborate directly with founders on product strategy and technical direction

Build scalable systems for structured product data ingestion and transformation

Develop agentic APIs used by frontier AI models and applications

Improve data quality, search relevance, and retrieval performance across the platform

Participate in customer conversations and help shape product roadmap decisions

Leverage modern AI coding tools to maximize engineering velocity

Help define engineering culture and technical standards as one of the earliest engineers

Drive technical decisions across backend, infrastructure, and AI systems

Operate in a fast-moving startup environment with significant ownership

Help establish long-term technical foundations for future company growth

Ideal Candidate Background

1–5 years of software engineering experience

Experience building backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, or infrastructure products

Experience shipping 0-to-1 products used by real customers

Experience at startups or highly regarded technology companies

Strong backend engineering fundamentals

Experience building production-grade APIs and distributed systems

Experience with search infrastructure, embeddings, retrieval systems, recommendation systems, or data platforms

Strong interest in AI-native products and infrastructure

Experience using AI coding tools such as Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, or similar

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field

Graduated from a strong technical university

Strong ownership mentality and willingness to work directly with founders

Comfortable operating in highly ambiguous startup environments

Strong communication and collaboration skills

Interest in entrepreneurship, startups, and building products from scratch

Ability to work onsite in San Francisco five days per week

Strong Signals

Experience at companies such as Cursor, Replit, Vercel, Cohere, Modal, Pinecone, LangChain, Weaviate, Anyscale, Supabase, Convex, Neon, Mercury, Ramp, Brex, Shopify, Stripe, Square, Databricks, Hugging Face, Snowflake, or similar

Startup experience with significant product ownership

Active GitHub profile with meaningful side projects

Personal projects demonstrating technical curiosity and initiative

Experience building APIs, search systems, recommendation engines, or retrieval infrastructure

Experience with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or ranking systems

AI-native engineering workflows and tooling

History of shipping products quickly and independently

Strong backend engineering depth

Strong technical curiosity outside of work

Evidence of entrepreneurial ambition

Experience working directly with customers

Strong product intuition

0-to-1 startup building experience

Ability to thrive in high-intensity startup environments

Track record of ownership and execution

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $120,000 – $170,000

Equity: 0.25% – 0.75%

Visa sponsorship available

Relocation assistance available

Direct exposure to founders and company strategy

Opportunity to shape engineering culture from the earliest stages

High ownership and visibility across the organization

Work alongside experienced founders from Square and Cash App

Opportunity to help build foundational infrastructure for AI commerce

Rapid learning environment with broad technical exposure

Significant upside through equity ownership

Fast-moving startup with strong market opportunity

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join one of the earliest teams building infrastructure for AI-native commerce.

The company is tackling a foundational problem: helping AI agents understand and transact with products across the real economy.

As a founding engineer, you'll have outsized influence on architecture, product direction, engineering culture, and company success.

The team is exceptionally small, creating opportunities for ownership and growth that are difficult to find elsewhere.

You'll work directly with experienced founders who have previously helped build products at massive scale.

The technical challenges span AI infrastructure, retrieval systems, search, ecommerce data, APIs, and agentic workflows.

If you're excited by AI infrastructure, startup ownership, commerce systems, and building foundational technology from the ground up, this role offers exceptional learning, responsibility, and long-term upside.