Founding Engineer - Elo
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 30, 2026. First seen by Alion on May 18, 2026. Pear VC scores A on the Alion truth index.
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
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:
Ad decisioning pipeline: candidate retrieval, scoring, filtering, and final ranking under strict latency SLAs
Publisher SDK: lightweight integration that AI app developers embed in hours, not days
Delivery infrastructure: pacing, frequency capping, budget management, and campaign throttling
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:
Your own AI agent harness or multi-agent workflow for complex tasks
Low latency network infrastructure and data pipelines serving millions of requests per second
Scalable and self-healing infrastructure with 1000s of compute workers spinning up and down with variable demand
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:
Care about your craft and operate ethically
Take extreme ownership of outcomes
Like to operate independently
Ship extremely fast and effectively use AI to accelerate your impact
Want to operate in a fun and social work environment
Apply and you’ll hear back in less than a day.