Founding Engineer, Search & Knowledge Systems

Location: NYC (Hybrid)
Compensation: $200,000+ base + founding equity

About Relevant

Recruiting is broken. Coaching is reserved for executives. Career transitions are often far more difficult than they should be.

At Relevant, we’re building a portfolio of products designed to help people navigate their careers with greater clarity, confidence, and support. Our products include Reva, Coach, Passport, and SuccessDNA — each tackling a different part of the career journey.

This is not another productivity app or AI wrapper.

We’re building systems that help people understand opportunities, make better decisions, and navigate complex career paths. The problems we’re solving sit at the intersection of search, knowledge representation, recommendations, reasoning, and human potential.

We’re still early. SuccessDNA is currently in design-partner and dogfooding stages, while several other products are being built from the ground up.

The Role

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to join directly after the founder and help shape the technical foundation of the company.

You’ll work across product, architecture, data, retrieval, search, and AI systems. This is a high-ownership role for someone who enjoys operating in ambiguity, making architectural decisions, and building systems from first principles.

You won’t inherit a roadmap.

You’ll help create it.

What You’ll Build

• Graph-based retrieval systems
• Semantic search and ranking infrastructure
• Knowledge representation and entity relationships
• Data models that support reasoning and personalization
• Recommendation and matching systems
• Agent-powered workflows and AI-enabled user experiences
• Core platform capabilities used across multiple products

What We’re Looking For

We’re less interested in AI titles and more interested in the systems you’ve built.

You may currently be a:

• Staff Software Engineer
• Principal Software Engineer
• Staff Backend Engineer
• Platform Engineer
• Data Platform Engineer
• Search Engineer
• Knowledge Graph Engineer
• Distributed Systems Engineer

You likely have experience with some combination of:

• Graph databases
• Knowledge graphs
• Semantic modeling
• Entity resolution
• Search infrastructure
• Retrieval systems
• Ranking systems
• Recommendation systems
• Large-scale data platforms

You should also bring:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong architectural and systems design skills
• Experience building and operating production systems at scale
• Ability to move from idea to implementation without waiting for detailed specifications
• A pragmatic mindset focused on shipping, learning, and improving

AI Experience

Experience with LLM-powered products, agents, retrieval-augmented systems, or AI applications is valuable.

At the same time, we are not looking for someone whose experience is limited to prompt engineering, AI orchestration frameworks, or application-layer integrations.

The foundation we care about is strong engineering, data systems, search, and knowledge representation.

Bonus Points

• Previous startup or founding engineer experience
• Experience building products from 0→1
• Experience leading engineers or technical initiatives
• Background in talent, recruiting, HR technology, or career development
• Interest in psychometrics, organizational design, or human performance

Why Join

You’ll have direct influence over product direction, architecture, and company strategy.

You’ll work closely with the founder and leadership team.

You’ll help define the technical foundations of a company that aims to meaningfully improve how people navigate their careers.

And you’ll do it with the ownership, autonomy, and upside that come with being an early founding team member.