About the Job

About Us: The travel industry is ripe for disruption. Today’s travelers seek authentic, inspiring, and personalized experiences, but the journey often starts with stress, uncertainty, and decision fatigue. We aim to revolutionize this by offering an AI travel partner that helps users discover, plan, and experience perfectly-tailored travel, all in one app. Our user-centric design, combined with advanced agent architectures and large language models (LLMs), ensures personalized, authentic, and meaningful travel experiences.

Market Opportunity:

With generational shifts in consumer preferences, the travel and tourism industry now represents over 10% of global GDP. Younger generations prioritize experiences over material possessions, seeking unique and authentic travel inspired by social media. Our AI travel agent addresses the gap between consumer expectations and the sector’s ability to deliver personalized experiences. The online travel market, already a $2.3 trillion industry, is projected to grow over 10% annually through 2030, positioning us to provide perfectly-tailored travel to millions.

Why Us?

Our mission is to empower the curious to discover and meaningfully experience the world by making travel simple, personalized, and joyful. Our experienced founding team comes from industry leaders such as Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, and YouTube, bringing together decades of expertise in consumer apps, AI/ML, design, and data-driven personalization. Backed by prominent venture funds, we are rapidly scaling to deliver the most advanced AI travel experience.

The Role: Founding Data Platform Engineer

As our Founding Data Platform Engineer, you will build the foundations that support delivering AI and ML solutions to our consumer application. You will shape our data infrastructure, driving our conversational AI agents, large language models, recommender systems, and ML algorithms.

Your ability to work autonomously and as part of a team is essential. You will guide decisions, identify opportunities, and establish the appropriate abstractions and frameworks to enable our technical teams and platform to scale. You’ll be deeply involved in our operations, ensuring the reliability of our infrastructure and developing any needed in-house computing solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Oversee all aspects of our Data Platform, reporting to the VP of Engineering.
• Enable rapid development and iteration of AI Agent architectures and LLMs by our machine learning team.
• Design, build, and maintain platforms and processes for high-velocity ML product development, productionalization, and data-driven decisions at scale.
• Leverage cloud platforms and third-party solutions to establish and manage our data warehouse, workflows, and orchestrations.
• Build strong relationships with our machine learning and engineering teams, fostering a culture of collaboration and technical excellence.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest technologies to ensure our solutions remain cutting-edge.

Desired Qualifications:

• Strong expertise in software engineering with exceptional coding and design skills; proficiency in Python required.
• Experience in developing infrastructure, frameworks, and tools to accelerate algorithm development, model deployment, and AI/ML applications integration.
• In-depth knowledge of cloud computing platforms, especially GCP or AWS, and familiarity with big data technologies like Kafka, Spark, Hive/Iceberg, Postgres, and Redis.
• Proven history of collaborating with data scientists and machine learning engineers, translating complex needs into actionable platform and engineering requirements.
• Experience designing and implementing microservice architectures, particularly low-latency REST APIs.
• Comfortable in fast-paced environments, adaptable to changes, and able to lead projects autonomously from conception to completion.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of conveying intricate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Background in building and managing data platforms in growth-oriented companies, whether in startups or tech-leading roles in larger organizations.

Bonus Experience:

• Strong familiarity with machine learning and AI concepts.
• Built scalable and robust infrastructure for generative AI systems.
• Experience building and maturing Data Platform teams and infrastructure in a startup environment.

Total Compensation & Pay Transparency:

• Cash Compensation: The expected cash compensation for US employees in this position is $200K - $250K.
• Equity: Significant ownership in the company.
• Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.

Our Team:

• Three-time entrepreneur and founder/CEO with a history of raising over $100M in funding.
• Four-time COO and three-time founding employee with a history of raising over $500M in funding.
• Hands-on engineering leader, and former CTO, with expertise in full stack development, who has built high-performing teams over 15 years, working for startups to Fortune 500 companies.
• Product leader with a decade of AI/ML product leadership experience across NLP, LLMs, signal processing, and computer vision.
• Machine learning expert with 12 years of experience working across domains from finance, ad tech, and search, with research driving over 500 academic citations.

Together, we’ve worked across dozens of different industries and share diverse backgrounds and interests, including computing, theater, skiing, physics, gardening, chess, mathematics, kiteboarding, and travel. We are all passionate about travel and started this company to solve the challenges of modern discovery and trip experiences.

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