Founding Engineer - Elo

Pear VC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading ad-tech company in San Francisco is on the lookout for a founding engineer to design their ad delivery engine within AI experiences. The role guarantees high equity with competitive compensation ranging from $170K to $220K. Candidates should have a strong background in technical infrastructure and evidence of excellence in building complex systems. This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a rapidly growing firm in a fun and innovative work environment.

Qualifications

• Experience in building AI agents or workflows for complex tasks.
• Proficiency in low latency network infrastructure for high request volumes.
• Ability to design scalable and self-healing infrastructures.

Responsibilities

• Design the ad delivery engine within AI experiences.
• Build infrastructure for ad decisioning under latency SLAs.
• Develop publisher SDK for quick integration.

Skills

Technical excellence

AI agent harness

Low latency infrastructure

Scalable infrastructure

Job description

Overview

Growl is the ad-network for consumer AI applications. We’ve gone from 0 to XXM users in our publisher network in 45 days of inception.

Background

With AI becoming the primary surface of interaction for internet users, it is inevitable that digital advertising will happen within AI experiences (including but not limited to chat).

Growl is aggregating supply across consumer AI apps to help them monetize their users via ads and help advertisers reach the right audience at the right moment.

We’re backed by top funds like PearVC and Audacious Ventures who’ve invested in billion dollar companies like Doordash and WorkOS. We also have advisors from mobile ad-tech and large consumer AI companies helping us in our mission. Founder is Sahil Manocha who’s a published researcher and has previously built ad infrastructure at Google.

Progress

We’ve already solved the hardest cold start problem with ad networks: onboarding both advertisers and publishers. Now, we need to build and improve the core infrastructure to serve the most contextually relevant ads at the right moment.

Role

Founding engineer who’ll help us design the engine for ad delivery inside AI experiences and supporting infrastructure. The role guarantees high equity and competitive compensation ($170K-$220K)

What you’ll build

We’re already processing millions of requests per minute which is set to increase dramatically over the next few months.

1. Ad decisioning pipeline: candidate retrieval, scoring, filtering, and final ranking under strict latency SLAs

2. Publisher SDK: lightweight integration that AI app developers embed in hours, not days

3. Delivery infrastructure: pacing, frequency capping, budget management, and campaign throttling

4. Observability stack: real-time dashboards for auction win rates, fill rates, revenue, and latency percentiles

What we’re looking for

We look for evidence of technical excellence.

If you’ve built any of the following, we’d love to chat:

1. Your own AI agent harness or multi-agent workflow for complex tasks

2. Low latency network infrastructure and data pipelines serving millions of requests per second

3. Scalable and self-healing infrastructure with 1000s of compute workers spinning up and down with variable demand

4. High frequency trading systems

Or anything that you believe reflects high calibre of engineering design and low-level systems understanding.

You’re a good fit if you

1. Care about your craft and operate ethically

2. Take extreme ownership of outcomes

3. Like to operate independently

4. Ship extremely fast and effectively use AI to accelerate your impact

5. Want to operate in a fun and social work environment

Apply and you’ll hear back in less than a day.