Product Engineer, Foundernest
Search & Artificial Intelligence
AI-powered scouting technology
Be an early applicant
AI-powered scouting technology
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
21-100 employees
Company mission
To augment the scouting power of the most innovative corporations in the world with AI.
Role
Who you are
- We are not hiring a specific title, we are hiring someone who can operate across systems
- You might come from product engineering, ML/AI engineering, Data Science or a generalist background, but this role is best suited for someone who has shipped product-facing systems where AI and search/retrieval were central to the user experience
- From an AI perspective, you understand how to design systems with LLMs, not just call them. You are comfortable with concepts like RAG, context structuring, retrieval quality, model trade-offs, and the importance of evaluation in production systems
- From an engineering perspective, you can build and ship reliable systems. You are comfortable working across APIs, services, and data pipelines, and you care about observability, performance, and maintainability
- From a product perspective, you take ownership of problems, not just tasks. You are proactive, comfortable with ambiguity, and focused on delivering real value to users
- From an AI-native workflow perspective, you use AI as a core part of your engineering workflow. You understand its tradeoffs and limitations, and you think in terms of systems, not just prompts. You leverage AI to accelerate development while maintaining quality and control
- From a search/retrieval perspective, you have hands-on experience helping users find, rank, retrieve, or reason over complex information. You understand that quality depends not only on the model, but also on indexing, retrieval strategy, relevance, context selection, and feedback loops
- Important: hands-on experience working with search, retrieval, or relevance systems. This does not need to mean being a pure search engineer, but you should have built or meaningfully contributed to systems involving ranking, indexing, query understanding, semantic search, relevance optimization, or large-scale data retrieval
- Given the nature of our product, this is a high-leverage area and a key part of the role
- We value curiosity, pragmatism, and low ego. You should be someone who learns fast, collaborates well, and helps raise the level of the team
- We are not looking for someone who knows everything, but for someone who can connect the dots, learn fast, and push the system forward
What the job involves
- We are looking for someone who can help us build and evolve these systems end-to-end, raising the bar of how we operate AI in production
- This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, AI systems, and data
- Ultimately, your work will shape how users interact with complex data through AI, turning raw information into actionable insights
- You will work end-to-end on AI-powered product capabilities, combining product thinking with system-level engineering
- Design and implement AI-powered search and retrieval experiences that combine LLMs, tools, structured data, ranking/relevance signals, and context retrieval
- Connect AI systems to real product surfaces (search, company data, workflows) and ensure they deliver meaningful outcomes
- Own AI quality by using and building evaluation frameworks, diagnosing failure modes, and improving reliability
- Operate across the stack, integrating AI with backend services and data pipelines, balancing cost, latency, and quality
- Collaborate with product, data, and design to translate ambiguous problems into working solutions and iterate based on feedback
- Break down ambiguous problems into simple solutions, iterating quickly to deliver value before scaling complexity
- Our stack includes Typescript and Python, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, BigQuery and DBT, and infrastructure running on Kubernetes (AWS). On the AI side, we work with multiple LLM providers, RAG pipelines, internal agents, and evaluation systems
- You don’t need experience with all of this, but you should be comfortable navigating similar environments
- This role focuses on building the core systems behind our AI-powered product experience, especially around search, retrieval, and reasoning over complex data
- You will help shape how AI and retrieval systems are designed, evaluated, and scaled at FounderNest, working across product, data, and engineering
- Your impact will not only be what you ship, but how the system evolves
Our take
FounderNest's AI-powered scouting technology enables founders and investors to connect in a neutral, efficient, and transparent way. Its AI Scout finds "companies that cannot be searched for" saving users time and money while increasing their connection opportunities.
The company has users across a range of industries across the world, including pharma, banking, insurance, construction, and more. Having emerged from stealth mode, the company is now backed by several top investors (the likes of which were early investors in Paypal, Square, Pinterest, Palantir, and Waze).
FounderNest has consistently grown over the last few years, seeing 2x MoM growth and more than tripling its workforce. The company is focusing on continued hiring to further scale across the globe.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
17% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Flexible Schedule
- Flexible Vacations Policy
- Stock Options
- 90/10 Policy: Team members can devote 10% of their time (usually a Friday every other week) to innovate and grow professionally
- Remote Friendly
- Equipment Provided
- Learning Budget
- Company Offsites, Events, and Activities
- Birthday Celebration Policy
Company HQ
University South, Palo Alto, CA
Leadership
Felix Gonzalez Herranz
(Co-Founder & CEO)Co-Founder & former CEO of JuntoSalimos. They have also been a Guest Lecturer at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid since 2014.
Miguel Gonzalez
(Co-Founder, COO & CPO)Co-Founder & former CPO of JuntoSalimos. Former Head of Digital Innovation at BBVA and held various positions at Google including Regional Lead of Program Management and Chief of Staff.
José Vicente Ruiz Cepeda
(Co-Founder & Technical Advisor)Co-Founder & former CTO of Relendo. Previous Software Engineering Intern at Yahoo Inc.
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