Founding Engineer

Job Overview

Pearl is revolutionizing travel by providing personalized experiences for discerning travelers and tailored service for venues. As the first engineer, your role is to enhance the MVP, focusing on the Pearl agent, social features, Guest Intelligence, and the backend infrastructure.

What You Will Do

• Build the Pearl agent 0 to 1: the harness, the agentic frameworks, and long-horizon booking workflows.
• Develop internal tools and platforms to accelerate the team's ability to ship and iterate.
• Create social features including the Pearl social graph, sharing, and discovery mechanisms.
• Implement Guest Intelligence, enabling venues to understand guest context and preferences.
• Ensure production integrity by managing backend, architecture, database, CI, and uptime.
• Collaborate with the product team, engaging with members and venues to refine scope and deliver value.
• Hire and interview the next engineers, setting the team's direction and culture.

Qualifications

• Passion for food, travel, and/or luxury, with a focus on understanding diners, travelers, and hospitality.
• Experience as an independent builder, capable of taking goals or problems, scoping them, building them, and shipping them.
• Background in full-stack engineering, including TypeScript, React or Next.js, a real backend, and Postgres or similar.
• A background in AI-native development, using models and agents to ship faster and integrate them into the product.
• Experience at a startup or working with fast-paced, demanding teams.
• Care about taste and user experience, creating a premium product rather than a mass-market offering.
• Remote-first is negotiable, but we expect to transition to a hybrid and in-person model as we scale.

What This Is Not

• A frontend-only consumer job or a narrow specialist role.
• A maintenance seat on a finished product.
• A large, bureaucratic company with extensive red tape.

What We Offer

• Real ownership and decision-making authority over projects and initiatives.
• A seat at the table for architecture, product, and hiring, not isolated within a silo.
• A small, founding team environment with minimal layers of management.
• Negotiable salary and equity packages.

Application

To apply, visit: https://joinpearl.co/careers/founding-engineer