Founding Product AI Engineer

$150K – $215K / 0.50% – 1.25%

About Roame

Our mission is to make travel perfect. Roame is a flight search engine using credit card points and miles. More than $69 billion worth of points issued every year. We empower over 1 million travelers to maximize the value of their points and miles.

We are backed by top investors including Y Combinator, Goodwater, Accel’s starters fund, and angel investors including the leading figure within points.

The Role

We are hiring for a Lead Full Stack Engineer who thrives in a fast-paced, ownership-driven environment. If you’re passionate about travel, aviation, and the world of credit card points and miles—and you’re excited to build from the ground up—this is your opportunity.​

As our first product-focused engineering hire, you’ll work directly with the CTO and collaborate closely with our engineering team. This is a hands-on role where you’ll lead both frontend and backend development, contributing across the stack—from product design to growth initiatives. We value a strong sense of ownership and a willingness to take initiative.​

You will be the jack of all trades for frontend and backend.

This position is based in San Francisco and requires in-person work five days a week.

What You’ll Do

• Own the development of our frontend application end-to-end, primarily using Next.js on Vercel.
• Collaborate with the team to implement changes aligned with company goals.
• Balance technical debt with engineering best practices, working backward from our objectives.
• Contribute to backend development using Firebase and Go.
• Explore and implement AI pipelines as part of our technology stack.
• Bring a keen eye for design, focusing on user-friendly interfaces and iterative improvements.
• Embrace rapid iteration cycles and quickly adapt to new ideas and knowledge.

What are we looking for?

• A strong interest in travel and credit card points/miles.
• 4+ years of engineering experience (0-1 experience is great, but we want to see production experience); personal project counts (with large amounts of users counts!)
• Have shown initiative to start outside of job projects in the relevant field, we love seeing cool personal projects with scale
• You own the frontend app development from end-to-end with no guidance needed. We expect you to push us to move faster
• We’re using NextJS on Vercel, Firebase, Go for data backend.
• Interest and understanding in AI pipelines with experience in building them.
• Good eye for design and then implementing it and reiterating it, keep pushing! This does not mean picture perfect color or pixel pushing, but you know what makes it easy for folks to use.
• Comfort with fast-paced iteration and continuous learning.
• Work in-person 5 days a week in San Francisco with lunch

Why join Roame?

• Join us as we fundamentally change the world of travel and points
• Salary Range: $150,000 – $215,000
• Equity: 0.5% to 1.25%
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) available
• Generous 401(k) with matching
• Commuter benefits
• Free lunches at our San Francisco office
• Company offsites featuring business-class travel and luxury hotels (using points, naturally)

Our company culture, or why you may or may not be excited about joining us:

• Strong work ethic is a significant competitive advantage

  As a startup we are trying to change the world and take on many large competitors. If this were easy, everyone would be doing it. Raw hours make a huge difference when facing overwhelming odds. We believe that having a strong work ethic is a competitive advantage, and we expect everyone at Roame to put in their best effort when they’re at work.

• Going above and beyond

  Have an idea? Disagree with folks (founders)? Action speaks orders of magnitude louder than words, show us. Speaking up is not for everyone, but building to prove/disprove is. Our job is to delight our customers, anything to make their lives magical is in line with our mission. We got here because lightning struck the same place multiple times, but not without taking the first step. We can’t resist passion especially when it grows greater than ours.

• Take ownership and be accountable

  We can rely on each member of the team to get their work done. When we say we’ll do something – we get it done without anyone checking in on us. This way, we can establish a culture of trust and not micromanage each other. We are as strong as our weakest link and we aim to help one another to complete our tasks.

• Be Nice

  We’re a family here, be nice to each other. We follow radical candor to get things done, we are a no-passive-aggressive shop, truth is hard to swallow, doesn’t mean it has to be delivered with malice. Egos are left at home, kindness is how we support each other. We are always improving at this.

• No filibustering; Disagree and commit

  We can disagree and commit. Not all of our ideas will be implemented, and sometimes the group will decide to do something one of us disagrees with. Even if we disagree with the decision, we commit to getting it done. It’s counterproductive to keep arguing and slow down implementation efforts; better to get it done quickly and see if it actually works instead of speculating otherwise.

1. An hour-long Phone Screen -> Basic Algorithms, Data Structures, and Architecture are all fair game. We care about past experiences and your lessons from them.
2. If all goes well with the phone screen, we would like to move on with an open-ended take home assignment, usually completed within the week.
3. Culture Interview -> It’s important you’re passionate about what we do, and we want to make sure Roame is the best place for your career growth and your interests.
4. Offer stage