Member of Technical Staff at Catalog (San Francisco, CA)
Catalog· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
Catalog is building the commerce layer for AI - the missing infrastructure that lets agents not just search the web, but understand, reason about, and transact with products. We power the next generation of AI experiences that will reshape how people discover and buy online.
Role
As a Member of Technical Staff, you will ship core systems, set engineering culture, and move the mission from prototype to platform. You will work across the stack and own problems end to end.
You might be a fit if you
- Have built zero to one products that users love and trust.
- Blend strong engineering with sharp product taste and data intuition.
- AI-native.
- Move fast, write clean code, and instrument everything.
- Want high ownership in a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco.
Example problems
- Design and ship agentic-search APIs that return structured, live product data in milliseconds.
- Integrate checkout rails so agents can transact with any merchant.
- Stand up an embeddings and retrieval layer that balances recall, precision, and cost.
- Launch a product graph and ranking pipeline that learns from real outcomes.
Nice to have
- Shipped data products in production.
- Experience with recommendation systems or information retrieval.
- Familiarity with developing APIs, search indexes, and data pipelines.
How we work
Small team, high trust, high intensity. We bias to in-person collaboration in North Beach, San Francisco. We debate, decide, and ship.
If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.
Why work at Catalog
- Extreme early-stage impact: As one of the first ~5 employees, you'll define engineering culture, architecture, and product direction from the ground up — ownership of problems from prototype to platform.
- High-leverage technical problems: Working on agentic-search APIs (millisecond response times), embeddings/retrieval at scale, product graph ranking pipelines, and checkout integration for AI agents — all at the intersection of ML, infrastructure, and commerce.
- Strong founding team: Co-founders with deep experience in fintech, ML, and commerce (Afterpay, Square, Curinos, Harvard math background) — building a category-defining company.
- Backed by top-tier investors: Acrew Capital (known for backing early-stage infrastructure and fintech) leads the round, with WndrCo and Hustle Fund participating.
- Culture: Described as "first-principles thinking" and "ambitious work" — ideal for engineers who like hard technical problems and want a hand in defining how AI interacts with the real economy getcatalog.ai.
- Location & work model: Onsite in San Francisco, California (SOMA / SF proper). Currently a small team (3 people), so likely high-collaboration, in-person culture.
- Open roles: Actively hiring a Founding Engineer / Member of Technical Staff as of July 2026 jobright.ai.