Founding Engineer

a16z-speedrun•San Francisco, CA

15h

About The Position

TAYA is a memory company using AI to help people remember what happened. Its first product is a voice-first AI paired with a wearable, designed to capture memories privately and help users retrieve them when needed. Founded by Elena Wagenmans, formerly of Apple and Stanford, TAYA is backed by MaC Venture Capital, Female Founders Fund, and a16z Speedrun. Pre-orders are open ahead of a planned 2026 launch. TAYA is seeking a founding engineer to own the software at the center of its product: the iOS app people use to capture, search, and relive memories. The app is already working; the role is to develop it into an indispensable daily product. The engineer will work directly with Elena, without organizational layers, and make decisions that will shape the product for years. This is a software-first role for someone who thinks in products rather than tickets and measures success by whether users return.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience building and shipping consumer iOS software.
Strong Swift engineering skills; familiarity with SwiftUI, AVFoundation, and the iOS platform.
Shipped at least one consumer app end-to-end, from an empty project to the App Store.
A strong point of view on software aesthetics and a track record of shipping work that demonstrates product taste.
Experience owning product metrics and improving retention, activation, or engagement.
Comfort working across APIs, managed services, and frontend development.
Track record of 0-to-1 building under ambiguity.
Strong opinions on privacy and data minimization.
Excellent attention to interaction detail.
Builds with AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Codex regularly and uses them to increase productivity.

Nice To Haves

Audio-heavy or real-time app experience.
CoreBluetooth or BLE hardware integration experience.
On-device machine learning or Core ML experience.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the iOS app as the daily interface for users' memory archives.
Own onboarding and the first-run experience, helping users reach their first meaningful memory quickly.
Define relevant retention metrics and build features and loops to improve retention.
Build AI-powered search and retrieval that surfaces relevant moments.
Improve the capture experience, including tap-to-capture, backgrounding, and audio handling.
Own synchronization between the wearable and app over BLE.
Integrate AI services and a managed backend such as Supabase.
Own a trustworthy privacy architecture, using on-device processing wherever possible.
Work with Elena across product, design, and go-to-market to ship, learn, and iterate.