Member of Technical Staff
About The Position
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.
Requirements
- 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
Nice To Haves
- 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
Responsibilities
- 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
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
