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pear-vc

Founding Engineer - Elo

🇺🇸 San Francisco, United States On-site IT Posted May 18, 2026
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Location San Francisco, United States
Workplace On-site
Category IT
IT Category Back End Engineer
Salary USD 170,000 - 220,000 / yearly
Language English
Posted May 18, 2026
Last verified May 30, 2026

Salary context for this role

JobGrid.eu combines visible employer pay, official public benchmarks, and current JobGrid listings for Back End Engineer.

Employer listing

Listed salary

USD 170,000 - 220,000 / yearly

Salary published on this job listing.

Source
Extracted from this visible public job listing
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Role summary by JobGrid

Founding Engineer - Elo at pear-vc: San Francisco, United States; On-site; IT; Back End Engineer; USD 170,000 - 220,000 / yearly. JobGrid adds normalized role facts, source context, and a path to the employer application page so candidates can compare the listing before applying.

  • Location and workplace: San Francisco, United States, On-site
  • Role classification: IT, Back End Engineer
  • Employer salary shown on the listing: USD 170,000 - 220,000 / yearly
  • Source freshness: checked by JobGrid on 2026-05-30.

Elo 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).

Elo 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 a published researcher and has previously built AI 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.


You’ll work on:

  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.