Founding Engineer
a16zspeedrunMillbrae (CA)
About the role
About TAYATAYA is a memory company. We use AI to help people remember what actually happened: what was said, what was promised, the idea you had and lost by lunch. Our first product is a voice-first AI you can talk to, paired with a wearable made to be worn. Most memory devices end up in a drawer because nobody wants them on their body. Ours is designed to be something you reach for, so it's there when it matters. It captures, holds onto privately, and hands back the moment you need it. Founded by Elena Wagenmans (ex-Apple, Stanford) and backed by MaC Venture Capital, Female Founders Fund, and a16z Speedrun. We care a lot about taste: how the product looks, feels, and reads is the product. Pre-orders are open ahead of a 2026 launch. Join us in building AI worth keeping on.
About the Role:
We're looking for a founding engineer to own the software at the center of Taya: the app people open every day to capture, search, and relive their memories. We have a working iOS app today. Your job is to take it from working to indispensable. You'll work directly with Elena, with no layers and no process, and the decisions you make now will define the product for years. This is a software-first role for someone who thinks in products, not tickets, and who measures success by whether people keep coming back.
Responsibilities:
- Own and evolve the iOS app, the daily driver for someone's entire memory archive
- Own onboarding and the first-run experience: get people to their first real memory fast
- Own retention: define the metrics that matter, then build the features and loops that move them
- Build AI-powered search and retrieval that surfaces the right moment
- Improve the capture experience: tap-to-capture, backgrounding, audio handling
- Own sync between the wearable and the app over BLEIntegrate AI services and a managed backend (Supabase or similar)
- Own a privacy architecture users can trust, on-device wherever possible
- Work with Elena across product, design, and GTM to ship, learn, and iterate
Qualifications:
3+ years building and shipping consumer iOS software Strong Swift engineer; SwiftUI, AVFoundation, and the iOS platform feel like home Shipped at least one consumer app end-to-end, from empty project to App StoreTaste: a strong point of view on how software should look and feel, and a track record of shipping work that shows itHas owned product metrics, not just features: you've moved retention, activation, or engagement and know how Comfortable across the stack: APIs, managed services, and frontend Track record of 0-to-1 building under ambiguity Strong opinions on privacy and data minimization Excellent attention to interaction detailAI-native: you build with Claude Code, Codex, and similar tools daily and get more done because of itAudio-heavy or real-time app experience is a plus CoreBluetooth / BLE hardware integration is a plus On-device ML or Core ML is a plus
Benefits:
- Founding engineer equity, real ownership from day one
- Competitive seed-stage salary
- Health, vision, and dental benefits
- Direct work with the founder on a product people are already pre-ordering
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