Engineering
Founding Engineer, Cook Engine
Own the path from a messy list of real ingredients to three meals someone can actually make tonight.
- Location
- Denver, CO or remote in the US
- Type
- Full time
- Compensation
- $165,000 to $200,000 plus 0.4% to 0.9% equity
Pantrly tells people what to cook with what they already have. The cook engine is the product: reading messy ingredients, respecting diets and allergies without fail, suggesting real recipes with honest times, and building a shopping list that never adds something you already own.
You would be an early engineer. The work is not glamorous and it decides whether people trust the app with dinner. A recipe that ignores a stated allergy is worse than no recipe at all.
What you would own
- Make suggestions hold up in a real kitchen: correct steps, honest times, ingredients that are actually on hand.
- Own the allergy and diet guardrails end to end, including the code-side checks that run after the model.
- Own the evaluation set. Every prompt change is measured against pantries with known good answers before it ships.
- Cut cost per suggestion without cutting quality, which mostly means routing better rather than prompting cleverer.
What we are looking for
- Five or more years building backend systems other people depend on.
- You have worked with language models in production and have opinions about evaluation that came from being burned.
- You write TypeScript comfortably, or you will within a fortnight.
- You care about the difference between a demo and a thing a tired parent relies on at 6pm.
How hiring runs
A thirty minute call with a founder, then a paid work session on a real problem from our backlog, three to four hours, then conversations with two people you would work with. Four steps, usually inside two weeks, and we tell you where you stand at every one.