Founding Product Engineer

Founding Product Engineer

Role

Founding Product Engineer

Location

San Francisco, CA

Employment Type

Full time

Work Schedule

In person Mon–Fri • Remote Saturdays

Compensation

$150K – $250K • Offers Equity

Apply Now

Why join us?

• People want what we make. We have 10x Tinder's match-to-date conversion rate, better week 4 retention than every major dating app in the world, and acquire users at a 5x lower cost than industry standard. The market has spoken: people want what we're building.
• We work on the most important factor for happiness. Meaningful relationships are the single strongest predictor of a fulfilling life. But the past two decades of social technology has pulled us toward infinite feeds and strangers online. Our mission is to ensure AI bends the arc back toward relationships that make life meaningful.
• We're backed by people who see consumer early. We've raised several million from some of the first investors in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Slack, and Notion. They include Mark Pincus (Zynga founder), Elad Gil, Mar Hershenson (founder / MP at Pear VC), and Andy Chen (former GP at Kleiner Perkins / Coatue).

Learn more about our work: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TechCrunch, Morning Brew

About The Relationship Company

Most social products make people lonelier. We were on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for building the one that doesn't.

We are a public benefit company building the social platform for meaningful, in-person connection. At our core is an AI system that deeply understands people and predicts who would like each other - we can identify whether two people in our network are close friends with 90% AUC while relying on zero social graph data.

Today, this powers Date Drop. But dating is just the start. Our mission is to help people find and nurture every relationship that defines a life: friends, mentors, collaborators.

We're led by a second-time founder who's spent five years building matching systems, with experience building core product & brand at early LangChain and Chris Re's lab at Stanford.

Your role

You'd be one of the first hires, working directly with the founder. This is a product building role, meaning you'll be responsible for engineering, design, product, analytics, and marketing for large features, shipping them out weekly. You will own the full loop from research to implementation to iteration.

• Manage a fleet of AI agents to own features end-to-end: frontend, backend, AI integrations, model training. Sample projects:
  • Train a gradient boosted tree to predict compatibility + use it to discard low-signal questions from our questionnaire
  • Design evals & conversation flow for a voice intake call
  • Build a recommendation system + UI for local events that people should go to based on their profiles
• Talk to users several times a week and turn what you learn into technical / product decisions
• Pick up whatever else needs doing, from growth to ops
• Learn a lot about building things people love, about 0-1 → 1-n, and about yourself

About you

• You want to build in consumer
• You know how to talk to users, gather insights, and turn them into product decisions
• You've built and shipped end-to-end, and you're comfortable making decisions across the stack: product, infrastructure, UX
• You use AI coding tools
• You enjoy owning big, ambiguous projects and making decisions autonomously
• You care that the work you do is good for the world
• You value working with people who are kind, curious, and pragmatic

What you'll get

• $150-250k base + equity
• Generous budget for AI tooling
• Free lunch, dinner, and snacks
• Work out of a beautiful office in San Francisco
• In-office gym
• $100/month relationship stipend — for dates, experiences, gifts, whatever helps you invest in your own relationships
• $100/month wellness stipend
• Top-tier health, vision & dental

How to apply

Send an email with the subject “Founding Product Engineer” to henry@relationship.co with:

• Your resume
• Your LinkedIn / personal website
• Any projects you've made. Live links are better - we care about craft and product thinking.

Apply Now

Interview loop

Our loop is designed to be enjoyable, reflect the work that you'll be doing, give you the space to fully express what makes you unique, and require minimal preparation. We aim to go from first call to offer within 2 weeks.

• 20 min coffee chat. We get to know each other. What are your values? What do you want out of life? How does your work fit into that?
• 1 hour product-technical. We'll give you a design doc to review. You'll critique the product decisions, critique the implementation, and then do some UI critique.
• 2-day paid work trial. Join us for 2 days, work on something real, and we both get to see what it's like to build together.
• Offer. We'll celebrate with dinner, get you set up, and start building together!