Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer Pearl San Francisco, CA Full-time Hybrid Pearl is building the future of travel, where you can be treated like a regular wherever you go and venues can give personalized service to anyone who walks through the door. We are the platform reinventing how the world's most discerning travelers discover, share and book places, and how venues tailor service to them. This is not a mass market product. We are building the Ferrari of travel. We are pre-seed, venture backed, and have more than $2M in credit grants from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, and Microsoft. Pearl learns each member's taste and uses it to curate exceptional places. An AI agent turns a prompt into a considered itinerary, plans the details, and handles the bookings. Members connect with people of similar taste, and that community is itself another source of discovery. Every choice deepens a taste profile that travels with them. Venues get the context to anticipate preferences and cater service. The real-world experience is more personal, and more carefully curated. You will be the first engineer. Our MVP is live and has strong traction. Your job is to take it to the next level: the agent and the harness it runs on, social features and the Pearl social graph, and Guest Intelligence for venues. You also own the backend, architecture, and database underneath. You own production, decide what ships, and hire the people who come next. How we grow This is not a CRUD app and not a maintenance seat. You take the live product to the next level across the board: the agent (and the harness you build 0 to 1), social features and the Pearl social graph, and Guest Intelligence so partner venues can use what we know about a guest. You also own the backend, architecture, and database that hold all of it up. We grow by building a consumer app people actually use, and the best of its kind. That is what lets partner venues curate service to our members. This two-sided product is how we align incentives. What you will do - Build the Pearl agent 0 to 1: the harness, the agentic frameworks, and long-horizon booking workflows that turn a prompt into a real trip. - Build the internal tools and platform that let this team ship and iterate faster. You work AI-native: models and agents as how you move, not a slide. - Build social: the Pearl social graph, sharing, and discovery so members find people and places of similar taste. - Own Guest Intelligence, the platform venues use to see guest context and taste and cater service instead of guessing. - Keep production honest: backend, architecture, database, CI, uptime. If it breaks, you see it. - Sit with the product. Talk to members and venues. Cut scope. Ship. - Hire and interview the next engineers, and set how this team works What we are looking for - You are passionate about food, travel and/or luxury. This is a product that hinges on understanding diners, travelers and hospitality. - You are an independent builder. You can take a goal or problem, scope it, build it, and put it in production. - You have shipped something 0 to 1 as a full-stack engineer (TypeScript, React or Next.js, a real backend, Postgres or similar). Not a ticket queue. - You are AI-native. You use models and agents to ship faster, and you put them in the product. This role is not training the taste model. The harness around the agent is yours. - Ideally, you have experience at a startup or working with fast-paced and demanding teams. - You care about taste and UX. This is a luxury/premium product, not mass market. - Remote-first is negotiable, but as we scale we expect to be hybrid and in person in San Francisco. Nice to have: agents in production, evals, travel or marketplace systems, social/graph, search, maps, mobile. What this is not - A frontend-only consumer job, or a narrow specialist role - A maintenance seat on a finished product - A large, bloated company with lots of red tape What we offer - Real ownership and responsibility. You lead projects and own decisions. - A real seat: architecture, product, and hiring, not a silo - A small founding team. No layers - Salary and equity to be negotiated Pearl is based in San Francisco. Apply: https://joinpearl.co/careers/founding-engineer