Job Description

Founding Engineer - AI & Music Intelligence (DJ)

Build the system that decides what plays next.

The Company

Mixtiles is a $300M profitable brand reinventing how homes feel.
We build products people didn’t know they needed - and now can’t live without:
Wall photos. Self-watering plants. Smart lighting.

Now we’re building something new.

The Product

DJ is our newest zero-to-one bet.
A smart speaker that doesn’t just play music - it understands the moment.

It listens to the room using audio and video.
Adapts to the people.
Builds the right soundtrack in real time.

This isn’t a playlist product.
It’s a taste engine - one that decides what should play next, and gets it right.

The Role

We’re looking for a founding engineer to build the intelligence behind DJ.

This is not a feature role.
It’s about creating the core system that understands music, context, and people - and turns that into decisions.

You’ll design the algorithms that power recommendations, transitions, and flow.
You’ll define how the system learns taste, reacts to signals, and improves over time.
You’ll go from idea -> prototype -> real users -> iteration - fast.

You’ll be part of a small team, with full ownership over what gets built and how.
Backed by Mixtiles, but operating like a startup.

What You’ll Do

• Build the core recommendation and decision engine behind DJ
• Design systems that model taste, context, and real-time signals
• Develop algorithms for sequencing, transitions, and session flow
• Turn messy inputs (behavior, feedback, environment) into clean decisions
• Experiment fast—test with real users, iterate, improve
• Define how we evaluate “good taste” and make it measurable
• Work across product, data, and engineering to shape the experience end-to-end

What You Bring

• Strong background in algorithms, ML, or recommendation systems
• Experience building systems that make real-time or sequential decisions
• Deep intuition for ranking, personalization, or taste modeling
• Ability to go from idea to working system - fast and independently
• Product instinct - you care not just about accuracy, but about how it feels
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and defining the problem as you go

Bonus If You’ve Done

• Worked on music, audio, or media recommendation systems
• Built ranking, retrieval, or session-based models at scale
• Designed evaluation frameworks for subjective systems (taste, quality, relevance)
• Have strong opinions about music - and can explain them

Why This Role

• Founding-level ownership on a brand new product
• A rare problem: turning taste into a system
• Small team, fast loops, real users from day one
• Backed by a company that knows how to build products people love