Founding Engineer

Sourcedirect Talent•,

5h•Hybrid

About The Position

30tril is building an AI food assistant that works for the household, not the seller: an iPhone app that plans meals, builds the grocery basket and helps you shop, with no ads. They are looking to hire their first Founding Engineer. The role involves taking a working product from internal testing to a live beta with real households, then to scale. The current product is an iPhone app with chat and voice, a Python/Django back end, and AI from several model providers behind one routing layer. The engineer will refine the architecture, set the technical roadmap with the founder, build missing pieces, and own problems end to end. They will also shape product decisions, sit in on household research, and set engineering standards for future hires. This is a product that the engineer and everyone in their life will use every day.

Requirements

Deep, recent hands-on work in Python (Django ideally) and Postgres
Experience reading and changing cloud infrastructure
Experience running your own deploys
Experience with TypeScript and React Native with Expo
Ability to own a large iPhone app end to end and work in its thin Swift layer when needed
Experience with AI in production: language-model features real users rely on, including tool calling, streaming, guardrails, and evaluations that gate every release, with an eye on cost and latency
Shipped a consumer product people used, ideally an iOS app through App Store review
Experience designing systems other engineers built on
Experience leading engineers or readiness to lead
Fluency with coding agents: directing, reviewing and debugging their work, and owning both the architecture and the shipped result
Product judgment: weighing user needs, incentives and commercial goals across experience, trust and business value
Ownership: making considered calls with incomplete information, using resources wisely, raising problems early and bringing solutions
Candor and respect: reasoned views, productive disagreement, owning mistakes and correcting course quickly

Nice To Haves

Product-catalog, entity-matching or data-ingestion work across many sources
Search or recommendations, including embeddings and vector search
Real-time voice
Experience in food, grocery, nutrition, health or D2C commerce
Previous founding-engineer or first-engineer seat

Responsibilities

Refine the architecture
Set the technical roadmap with the founder
Build the missing pieces
Own problems end to end
Shape product decisions
Sit in on household research
Set the engineering standards future hires inherit
Turn messy, contradictory product data from hundreds of sources into one catalogue
Recognize the same product across retailers, pack sizes and label changes, and keep price and availability fresh
Plan for several people with different needs, preferences and budgets
Turn any recipe link into a week's plan, a basket and step-by-step help at the stove
Keep discovery personal and current across creators, experts and recipes
Build an assistant that acts for the household reliably
Ensure an answer is right before a user sees it, and keep it right as models and data change
Balance speed, cost and quality across model providers in real-time chat and voice
Own the whole stack: the problems above and everything beneath them, from data pipelines to the app
Build, deploy and monitor everything yourself, with tests and quality baselines gating every release
Handle App Store releases, reliability, and the safety and security standards real users depend on
Build end-to-end tools for creators to publish and operate on the platform
Build the systems the company needs as it builds out each function