Founding Engineer

About the role

I'm hiring a founding engineer to build Newsreel with me.

Founding means what it sounds like. You'll own real surface area from week one, make architecture decisions we'll live with for years, and ship things to real users in days rather than quarters.

Most of what we try won't work. That's the job. We're looking for someone who finds that energizing rather than exhausting.

What you'll work on

• The product itself: TypeScript, React, and Next.js on the web, and React Native (or native Swift) for mobile
• The intelligence layer: Python services for summarization, ranking, and recommendation — the part that decides what a reader sees and why
• The pipelines that ingest, dedupe, and structure news from a lot of messy sources
• Whatever else the week demands. Titles are loose here.

You won't own all of this on day one, but you should be excited about ranging across it.

Who you are

• You've shipped production software and can point to something you built end to end
• You're comfortable being the person who figures it out — no roadmap handed to you, no one to escalate to
• You have taste. You can tell the difference between a feature that's finished and one that merely works
• You can be in our New York City office 3 days a week

Passion beats experience here. I'd rather hire someone with three years of experience who can't stop thinking about this problem than someone with ten who's looking for their next comfortable seat.

Nice to have

• Early-stage startup experience, or you've built and shipped something on your own
• Work with LLMs in production — retrieval, evals, cost and latency tuning, the parts that are actually hard
• Consumer product instincts

Details

• Full-time, in person in New York City, 3 days a week in office
• Compensation is a mix of salary and meaningful equity — you're a founding engineer, and the equity should reflect that

How to apply

Send a note to [email protected]. Tell me two things: what drives you, and why Newsreel specifically.

Please don't send me an AI-generated email.