Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer at Wayback Labs
Founding Engineer
Location: Los Angeles
Location Type: HYBRID
Employment Type: FULL\_TIME
Wayback Labs is a new startup building playful consumer products at the intersection of AI and camera roll.
We're seeking a founding engineer to join our tiny team! We're funded but pre-launch, so truly a ground floor opportunity for the right person.
The iPhone is now 18 years old (!!), and we all have thousands of photos and screenshots—captured over decades—just idling in our camera roll. Previously this was unstructured chaos. But we're using AI vision models to analyze your camera roll and construct a deeply personalized understanding of who you are—and we’re using that to build entirely new categories of personalized software. It's a huge opportunity.
Wayback Labs was started by Jonathan Wegener, who previously founded Timehop (the company that invented digital nostalgia, 25M+ users, acquired). He also ran the Memories product at Snapchat, and has spent the last decade obsessed with how photos shape memory and identity. He's an experienced founder who has started three companies, raised $17M, hired dozens of people, and worked at Snapchat and Tinder 👻🔥
About you -- two possible archetypes we have in mind:
Archetype 1:
🧠 iOS nerd, deep swift experience, obsessively watches/attends WWDC and tries all the latest APIs/SDKs
📱 built consumer mobile apps at scale
🎥 experience with rich media: photos, video, camera, audio (ex-snapchat, tiktok, clubhouse, instagram/facebook etc)
👁️ has used Apple vision, coreML etc.
🚀 has shipped side projects
📍 Located in California (SF/LA/SD) or willing to spend a week per month here.
Or Archetype 2:
🧠 backend generalist
🎥 experience working with photo/video and LLMs
📝 experience with evaluation/benchmarking
📱 built/managed consumer products at scale, ideally supporting mobile app front ends
🚀 has shipped side project
📍 Located in California (SF/LA/SD) or willing to spend a week per month here.
If any of this hits a nerve, we'd love to chat, email us at [\[email protected\]](https://echojobs.io/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection) - you can ignore the lame form below :)