Founding Software Engineer

StardriftAI travel plannerFounding Software Engineer$125K - $175K•1.00% - 3.00%•San Francisco, CA, USJob typeFull-timeRoleEngineering, BackendExperienceAny (new grads ok)VisaWill sponsorSkillsPython, ReactConnect directly with founders of the best YC-funded startups.Apply to role ›Leila ClarkCTOLeila ClarkCTOAbout the roleWe are building a world-class search booking experience. In our vision of the world, you won’t book travel by opening ten tabs in Google Flights; you’ll book through a personalized AI assistant that understands everything about you and automatically arranges your trip for you.

We're looking for a founding engineer to join the our team of 3-4. You'll tackle everything from optimizing LLM performance and building evals to integrating APIs like Amadeus and Duffel. We have no shortage of customer interest and are bottlenecked entirely on product development. Your job will be to take customer feedback and improve our product, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder & the rest of founding team.

You’re a good fit if… You are a backend engineer who is full-stack curious. You aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty in the rest of the stack—whether that’s writing complex React code, developing a data pipeline from scratch or configuring nginx. You design simple, elegant solutions to complex problems. Bonus if you’re mathematically capable. You work fast and produce good code. You are comfortable with uncertainty.

We pivot weekly based on customer feedback; you’re aren’t too attached to specific features or directions. You are detail-obsessed. You think through every edge case before shipping. You are scrappy, intense, and stubborn about solving problems. You drive your projects through to completion. You can set direction, make judgement calls and drive projects forward without waiting for perfect clarity.

You’re AI-native. You’re not afraid to read an ML paper or two if needed, and you know when to incorporate it into code. You've shipped an LLM app. Send us the link—we'll try it and respond. You’re quietly brilliant. You don’t think of yourself this way, but your friends and colleagues all think you’re incredibly smart. You’re low-ego about your work. you care primarily about finding the best solution to the problem, and not about being right all the time.

You’re communicative. You write clear PRs, ask for help when stuck, defend your decisions, and update when wrong. You're kind and considerate. We work hard, but we're humans first. We look out for each other and assume good intent. Bonus: You appreciate good design (UX, graphic or systems) 300+ hours in planes Our strongest candidates usually attended top schools (Berkeley, CMU, Waterloo, MIT) or worked at top companies.

About us We are a very small, close and ambitious team. We work in-person in San Francisco, five days a week out of an office in the Mission. We start at 10am and stay until the work is done—sometimes 7pm, sometimes midnight. Our stack is a fairly standard setup of Postgres/FastAPI/Next. We wish we could write more Rust, but don’t often get the chance to. We have unlimited vacation and a flexible travel policy.

If you want to travel home and work remotely for a week, that’s cool as long as you’re still getting things done at a good pace (and tax/labor laws permit). We can’t provide fully hybrid or remote work arrangements. About the interviewOur interview cycle has three stages: Phone Screen (20 minutes): A quick call with our founder to introduce the company, hear about your background and goals and answer any quick questions.

Technical Screen (30 minutes-1 hour): A straightforward interview question, designed to test your ability to understand a straightforward technical spec and implement it. We aren’t playing algorithmic bingo; we’re trying to see how quickly you can solve a problem and how well you communicate about solving it. In-person work trial (1-3 days): You’ll come to our office, meet the team and work on a real project.

This is paid, and if you’re based in another state, we will cover your flights and accommodation in San Francisco. We’ve found a work trial to be best way to determine if there’s a mutual fit, and candidates have historically enjoyed it a lot as well. If this isn’t possible for some reason, we can also find another solution. We move quickly and can make an offer within a few days if needed. About StardriftStardrift is an AI assistant with the expertise of a top-tier travel agent.

We're tackling an incredibly ambitious challenge: finding travel information that isn't captured in today's computer systems, transforming it into structured data, and using it to build a world-class booking experience. Current search tools are missing a lot of information about the world. Which airplanes have Starlink? Why is CDG the worst airport in Europe to transfer through? When should you take the Northeast Corridor instead of flying?

Today's travelers open ten tabs in Google Flights and pray for the best. We're building something better: an AI that understands your preferences, filters all options, and books correctly-priced trips tailored to you. We're starting with corporate travel search in the domestic USA. Getting this right is useful, challenging and valuable. Previous travel tech companies have become unicorns, like ITA Matrix (acquired by Google in 2005 for 1b+), Amex GBT (public, 4b+) and Booking.com (public, 150b+).

With LLMs, we can do so much more: enable huge deals, reunite families for holidays, and open life-changing opportunities abroad. StardriftFounded:2024Batch:S24Team Size:3Status:ActiveLocation:San Francisco FoundersLeila Clark CTOLeila Clark CTO