Who is Recruiting from Scratch
Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.
Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Company Stage of Funding: Seed ($18.5M raised)
Office Type: On-site
Salary: $180,000 – $300,000 + 0.25%–0.75% Equity
Visa: O1, STEM OPT, H1B (fee-exempt only)
Our client is building the infrastructure layer that teaches AI systems taste — enabling models to evaluate subjective quality across creative and aesthetic domains.
Their platform develops agent architectures, evaluation systems, synthetic data pipelines, embeddings infrastructure, and reinforcement learning environments that help foundation models and application-layer AI products better understand subjective judgment.
This is a rare opportunity to join an elite early-stage AI company building foundational infrastructure for one of the hardest unsolved challenges in artificial intelligence: teaching models nuanced human taste.
You’ll join a world-class team with backgrounds across frontier AI, search infrastructure, indexing systems, and large-scale model evaluation.
Build and ship AI systems across backend and product surfaces
Design agent harnesses and self-improvement loops
Build memory systems for autonomous agents
Design synthetic data generation pipelines
Develop large-scale evaluation infrastructure
Build embedding and retrieval systems at production scale
Create scalable vector search infrastructure
Develop web crawling and scraping systems for visual datasets
Build inference serving systems
Develop APIs powering client-facing AI products
Build internal tooling for data operations
Develop external annotation tooling
Ship full-stack product experiences when needed
Build gamified user-facing experiences
Develop reward and leaderboard systems
Improve system reliability and performance
Work directly with leadership on technical architecture
Build core infrastructure from scratch
Ship rapidly in a highly ambiguous startup environment
Help define the technical direction of the company
4+ years of software engineering experience
Strong backend or full-stack engineering experience
Strong Python proficiency
Strong TypeScript / React proficiency
Experience building production AI systems
Experience working with LLM systems
Strong systems design fundamentals
Experience building scalable infrastructure
Strong product engineering instincts
Comfort with ambiguity
Strong ownership mindset
Fast execution velocity
Ability to operate independently
Strong technical curiosity
Excellent problem-solving ability
Comfort building greenfield systems
Built agent systems in production
Designed evaluation pipelines
Synthetic data generation experience
Embeddings / vector DB experience
Built crawling / indexing infrastructure
Inference serving experience
LLM orchestration expertise
LangChain / PydanticAI / LlamaIndex experience
Built retrieval systems at scale
Experience with reinforcement learning environments
Early-stage startup experience
Open-source contributions
Strong side projects
Creative technology background
Experience at AI-native startups
Worked on subjective evaluation systems
Strong product taste
Experience at indexing/search companies
High experimentation velocity
Strong systems architecture judgment
Built from zero to production repeatedly
Base salary: $180,000 – $300,000
Equity: 0.25%–0.75%
Visa sponsorship available
High ownership environment
Direct technical influence
Early-stage equity upside
Greenfield AI infrastructure challenges
Work alongside elite AI engineers
Fast-moving engineering culture
Deep technical autonomy
Opportunity to shape foundational AI infrastructure
This is an opportunity to work on one of AI’s most technically difficult frontier problems: teaching machines subjective judgment.
You’ll help build infrastructure that enables AI systems to evaluate quality, aesthetics, and taste across domains — work that sits at the intersection of infrastructure engineering, model evaluation, retrieval systems, and agent architectures.
If you want to build foundational AI systems from scratch, work with elite technical talent, and solve genuinely novel problems, this role offers exceptional technical leverage.
Recruiting from Scratch provides recruiting services for companies that need to hire the best talent in software engineering, hardware engineering, product design, product management, marketing, GTM, and accounting & finance.
