Company Overview

GIFTS AI is on a mission to revolutionize personal and corporate gifting by developing the world's first AI-native commerce platform designed explicitly for gifting. We aim to solve the "cold start" problem in e-commerce recommendations through a sophisticated AI architecture that understands the nuanced semantics and emotional dimensions of human relationships. Backed by the NVIDIA Inception startup program and built by a fast-moving team of serial entrepreneurs and tech veterans, GIFTS AI features an engineering culture rooted in rapid iteration, intellectual curiosity, and unmatched autonomy.

Job Summary

As a Founding Senior Engineer at GIFTS AI, you will play a pivotal role shaping our product, technical architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up. You will drive core development of breakthrough features across our AI-powered gifting assistant (Charis) and underpinning platform technologies. This is a rare opportunity to join at a foundational level and have an outsized impact on the trajectory of the company, product vision, and team DNA—delivering innovative, emotionally intelligent AI-powered gifting experiences to millions.

Key Responsibilities

Scale the core GIFTS AI platform architecture and expand capabilities for Charis, our AI-driven gift assistant built on a utility agent framework, enabling deeply personalized, context-aware recommendations.
Design and build semantic data layers using MongoDB Atlas, leveraging native vector search to drive next-level personalization and relevance in gift recommendations.
Lead integration of advanced AI/ML including:
- Contextual metadata classification using cutting-edge Transformer models (e.g., DeBERTa) to assess emotional tone, occasion relevance, and recipient alignment.
- Collaborative filtering engines (User-User, Item-Item, Hybrid) using LightFM to enhance discovery and match quality.
- Next-gen capabilities, such as multi-modal vector embeddings and real-time trending personalization, enhancing user experience and product stickiness.
Drive end-to-end full-stack feature development, from architectural design and prototyping to production deployment and scale.
Help define and uphold engineering best practices, growth mindsets, and an intellectually curious team culture focused on velocity and excellence.

Required Qualifications

5+ years hands-on software engineering experience, ideally within high-growth startup environments.
Expert coding ability in Node.js and React for building performant, seamless user interfaces and real-time web applications.
Deep hands-on experience with MongoDB Atlas, including unified operational and native vector search pipelines.
Expertise in PyTorch and Transformer architectures for NLP and semantic classification (specifically DeBERTa or similar models).
Production-level experience building and deploying Vector DB-RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines and working with multi-modal vector data.
Strong track record implementing collaborative filtering algorithms (e.g., LightFM) for personalization in recommender systems.
Self-driven: thrives in environments defined by rapid iteration, ambiguity, and high autonomy.
Remote work discipline, with excellent asynchronous communication and documentation skills.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with operationalizing AI in e-commerce, social, or gifting platforms.
Familiarity with utility agent frameworks and conversational AI.
Experience designing or scaling cloud-based architectures with serverless or microservices patterns.
Previous roles as a technical founder or early-stage founding engineer.
Demonstrated passion and understanding of the emotional/empathic context in product design.

Benefits & Compensation

Compensation Structure:
- Founding-level equity (meaningful, not token) during the initial 3–6 month phase.
- Transition to competitive cash and equity mix after successful fundraising (top-tier market for senior engineers).
Rare ground-floor opportunity; unparalleled equity upside as a true co-builder, not just employee #1X.
100% remote – work from anywhere with highly flexible hours and a focus on outcomes, not clock-in time.
Direct influence over architecture, product, and engineering culture.
Access to guidance, mentorship, and networking via the NVIDIA Inception community and serial entrepreneur leadership team.
Continuous learning opportunities: access to conference resources, educational stipends, and the ability to shape product and team as you grow.

If you are a mission-driven 10x builder who craves technical challenges, team impact, and the chance to create the future of gifting from the ground up—let’s talk. Join GIFTS AI and help us turn the science of relationships into magical, effortless moments of gifting.