| Location | San Francisco, California (Remote) |
| Website | recruitingfromscratch.com |
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.)
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.
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
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
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
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
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.