Pearl is building the future of travel, where you can be treated like a regular wherever you go and venues can give personalized service to anyone who walks through the door.
We are the platform reinventing how the world's most discerning travelers discover, share and book places, and how venues tailor service to them.
This is not a mass market product. We are building the Ferrari of travel. We are pre-seed, venture backed, and have more than $2M in credit grants from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, and Microsoft.
Pearl learns each member's taste and uses it to recommend exceptional places. An AI agent turns a prompt into a considered itinerary, plans the details, and handles the bookings. Members connect with people of similar taste, and that community is itself another source of discovery. Every choice deepens a taste profile that travels with them. Venues get the context to anticipate preferences and cater service. The real-world experience is more personal.
You will be our founding AI engineer. Our MVP is live and has strong traction. Your job is to own the machine learning that makes Pearl feel personal: the taste model that recommends places, ranking and retrieval, the taste profile that travels with each member, and the model that powers the planning and booking agent. There is no platform team, no PM writing tickets, and no one else to own models in production.
The job
You ship taste, ranking, retrieval, search and maps, and member/venue embeddings end to end. You keep the member's taste profile current as they travel. You put the planning and booking agent's models in production and keep them there. You help set the bar for how we build this, and you hire the next people on it.
What you will do
- 01Own the taste and curation models members actually use
- 02Improve search, maps, ranking, and retrieval so people find the right place
- 03Embed member, venue, and social data so the system actually understands taste
- 04Power the AI agent that plans itineraries and completes bookings
- 05Put models in production. Evals, latency, cost, and uptime are yours. If it is wrong, you see it
- 06Sit with the product. Talk to members and venues. Cut scope. Ship.
- 07Be part of hiring and interviewing the next engineers, and help set how this team works
What we are looking for
- 01You are passionate about travel and/or luxury. This is a product that hinges on understanding travelers and hospitality.
- 02You are an independent builder. You can take a goal or problem, scope it, build it, and put it in production
- 03You have shipped 0 to 1 ML in a real product. Training or fine-tuning, retrieval or ranking, embeddings, evals, and inference in production. Python. Not prompt-only.
- 04Ideally, you have experience at a startup or working with fast-paced and demanding teams.
- 05You are AI-forward. You use models and agents as tools inside the product, not as the product
- 06You care about taste and UX. This is a luxury/premium product, not mass market.
- 07Remote-first is negotiable, but as we scale we expect to be hybrid and in person in San Francisco
Recsys, geospatial/maps, agents in production, travel or marketplace data, TypeScript enough to ship with the app team
What this is not
- A research lab or a paper-first job
- A prompt-wrapper role, or a narrow specialist who never ships
- A large, bloated company with lots of red tape
What we offer
- Real ownership and responsibility. You lead projects and own decisions.
- A real seat: models, product, and hiring, not a silo
- A small founding team. No layers
- Salary and equity to be negotiated
Pearl is based in San Francisco.
Founding AI Engineer
PearlSan Francisco, CAFull-timeHybrid
Pearl is building the future of travel, where you can be treated like a regular wherever you go and venues can give personalized service to anyone who walks through the door.
We are the platform reinventing how the world's most discerning travelers discover, share and book places, and how venues tailor service to them.
This is not a mass market product. We are building the Ferrari of travel. We are pre-seed, venture backed, and have more than $2M in credit grants from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, and Microsoft.
Pearl learns each member's taste and uses it to recommend exceptional places. An AI agent turns a prompt into a considered itinerary, plans the details, and handles the bookings. Members connect with people of similar taste, and that community is itself another source of discovery. Every choice deepens a taste profile that travels with them. Venues get the context to anticipate preferences and cater service. The real-world experience is more personal.
You will be our founding AI engineer. Our MVP is live and has strong traction. Your job is to own the machine learning that makes Pearl feel personal: the taste model that recommends places, ranking and retrieval, the taste profile that travels with each member, and the model that powers the planning and booking agent. There is no platform team, no PM writing tickets, and no one else to own models in production.
The job
You ship taste, ranking, retrieval, search and maps, and member/venue embeddings end to end. You keep the member's taste profile current as they travel. You put the planning and booking agent's models in production and keep them there. You help set the bar for how we build this, and you hire the next people on it.
What you will do
- 01Own the taste and curation models members actually use
- 02Improve search, maps, ranking, and retrieval so people find the right place
- 03Embed member, venue, and social data so the system actually understands taste
- 04Power the AI agent that plans itineraries and completes bookings
- 05Put models in production. Evals, latency, cost, and uptime are yours. If it is wrong, you see it
- 06Sit with the product. Talk to members and venues. Cut scope. Ship.
- 07Be part of hiring and interviewing the next engineers, and help set how this team works
What we are looking for
- 01You are passionate about travel and/or luxury. This is a product that hinges on understanding travelers and hospitality.
- 02You are an independent builder. You can take a goal or problem, scope it, build it, and put it in production
- 03You have shipped 0 to 1 ML in a real product. Training or fine-tuning, retrieval or ranking, embeddings, evals, and inference in production. Python. Not prompt-only.
- 04Ideally, you have experience at a startup or working with fast-paced and demanding teams.
- 05You are AI-forward. You use models and agents as tools inside the product, not as the product
- 06You care about taste and UX. This is a luxury/premium product, not mass market.
- 07Remote-first is negotiable, but as we scale we expect to be hybrid and in person in San Francisco
Recsys, geospatial/maps, agents in production, travel or marketplace data, TypeScript enough to ship with the app team
What this is not
- A research lab or a paper-first job
- A prompt-wrapper role, or a narrow specialist who never ships
- A large, bloated company with lots of red tape
What we offer
- Real ownership and responsibility. You lead projects and own decisions.
- A real seat: models, product, and hiring, not a silo
- A small founding team. No layers
- Salary and equity to be negotiated
Pearl is based in San Francisco.
Founding AI Engineer. San Francisco, hybrid.