Founding Engineer & AI Lead
About June AIJune AI is building the design operating system for the $150B events industry — transforming vendor catalogs into AI-powered design sites to go from a creative idea to a placed order in record time.June is profitable, well-funded and rapidly growing. We’ve 10x-ed our paying event supplier base in just 4 months, with thousands of event pros now using June’s design sites each week to get creative work done faster than ever.The company is founded by an ex-Instagram, ex-DeepMind team with ex-IDEO design support and deep roots in the event planning industry.About the roleWe’re looking for a senior engineer who can become a technical owner of June’s product. For this right person, this role is design to grow into CTO.In this hands-on leadership role you’ll write code, shape product architecture, guide contractors, make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions, and help define June’s technical direction.You’ll use the best models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to build magical workflows for a very specific industry. This includes AI-powered search, visual generation, and increasingly capable creative agents that can understand planner intent, reason across messy inventory catalogs, and take action on behalf of users.What you’ll ownYou’ll work directly with the founder/CEO and help turn customer needs into fast, elegant product features. You’ll build the systems that:Turn messy vendor catalogs into usable product intelligence. Build the ingestion, enrichment, tagging, and search systems that make inconsistent rental inventory easy to discover, recommend, and use inside design workflows.Create AI workflows that connect inspiration to real products. Combine LLMs, vision models, embeddings, image generation, metadata, and ranking systems to help users scan inspiration, extract style direction, and find matching products from vendor catalogs.Build the product infrastructure behind magical design tools. Own the APIs, queues, evals, backend systems, and frontend prototypes needed to ship fast, reliable features across search, recommendations, rendering, and design workflows.Help set the technical direction for June. Make pragmatic architecture decisions, choose when to build vs. buy, guide our remote engineering team, and keep the product moving quickly without overengineering.Grow the team. Help recruit our next set of technical hires, building an engineering team with a culture of scrappy engineering excellence.What we’re looking forYou’ll have some combination of:Deep product engineering experience. You’ve spent 5+ years building customer-facing software, likely as a senior, staff, founding, or early engineering hire, with strong backend or full-stack depth.Strong Startup Success & Judgement. You’ve spent at least 2 years at a high-growth start-up shipping major impact, with a measured history of success (e.g. promotions). You can turn ambiguous product needs into simple technical paths, make tradeoffs quickly, and guide junior, contract, or remote engineers without creating process for process’s sake.Hands-on applied AI experience. You’ve shipped production features using LLMs, vision models, embeddings, image generation, multimodal APIs, or similar tools — and you know how to use them pragmatically, not academically.Experience with search, recommendations, or structured discovery. You’ve worked on systems where users express messy intent and the product has to match it to structured or semi-structured data.Ideal backgroundYou’ve built production features in one or more of these areas:Search, discovery, or recommendations. You’ve worked on ecommerce search, marketplace discovery, ranking, retrieval, semantic search, visual search, or product recommendation systems.Catalog-heavy or marketplace products. You’ve dealt with messy inventory, inconsistent metadata, third-party data ingestion, or products where the challenge is making structured data usable to customers.AI-native workflow tools. You’ve built features that use LLMs, vision models, embeddings, image generation, or multimodal APIs to help users get real work done faster.Creative or visual product experiences. You’ve worked on design tools, visual discovery, image tagging, visual similarity, or systems that connect visual inspiration to usable outputs.The strongest fit is someone who has worked on products where the core challenge was matching messy user intent to structured or semi-structured inventory. For June, that means helping planners turn inspiration images, vague style direction, venue context, and vendor catalogs into real products, realistic visuals, and better design decisions.Tech and ToolsYou don’t need to have used our exact stack, but you should be comfortable ramping quickly across:Product engineering: TypeScript, Python, React, Postgres, APIs, backend services, queues, and cloud infrastructureSearch and retrieval: embeddings, rerankers, vector databases, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, or similar systemsApplied AI workflows: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Replicate, image models, vision models, multimodal APIs, and eval systemsData ingestion: scraping, import workflows, metadata extraction, catalog normalization, and legal/ToS-aware data handlingThe person who will thrive hereYou move fast, but you don’t hack blindly. You can take an ambiguous product need, break it into a clear technical path, and ship the simplest useful version. You care about product quality, but you don’t overbuild. You know how to creatively combine the best available AI models into practical, scalable product experiences.You should be excited by problems like:“How do we turn visible style themes from inspo into organized design recs?”“How do we deliver magical product search atop messy and inconsistent vendor data?”“How do we combine image understanding, embeddings, metadata, and generation into seamless workflows?”“How do we help planners visualize real products in real venues faster than ever?”Role DetailsLocation: San Francisco preferred; hybrid, 3 days/week in officeType: Full-time, founding employeeReports to: Founder/CEOCompensation: Competitive cash + meaningful founding-level equity