Catalog Engineer (Backend/Data/AI)
Remote (US/Canada, SF preferred)120-160k cash / 0.5-0.8% equityfull-time
Benefits
About company
We want to be the first thing one billion people think of when they think of books.
We've started with a high-craftsmanship native iOS app to track and discover books, targeting the 20 million Americans who read a book a week and the hundreds of millions who aspire to read more.
Since launching on Christmas Eve, we've had 100,000 users track 13 million books and log 250,000 hours of reading time.
About the role
We want to be the first thing one billion people think of when they think of books.
We've started with a high-craftsmanship native iOS app to track and discover books, targeting the 20 million Americans who read a book a week and the hundreds of millions who aspire to read more.
Since launching on Christmas Eve, we've had 100,000 users track 13 million books and log 250,000 hours of reading time.
Now we're looking for a Backend/Data/AI Engineer to help us build the best catalog of book data in the world.
If "craftsmanship" and "books" resonates, send a description of some things you've worked on to paul@margins.app
You
Must-haves:
Loves making order out of chaos
Has spent a lot of time thinking about cleaning messy data
Is often described as "excessively detail-oriented"
Can describe an ETL project you've worked on
Lives in US/Canada
Nice-to-haves:
Has scraped and parsed 10m+ web pages using Python/TypeScript/Postgres
Can name at least 3 books that changed your life
Tends to stick around for multiple years
Has worked at an early-stage startup recently
Has founded a company before
Lives near San Francisco
Us
We are...
Between us, we've…
Read 5,000+ books
Founded 5 companies ($35m+ raised)
Led product, software, and AI at startups that have raised $300m+
Written open source Swift libraries with 5,000+ stars
Built social apps, AI apps, and a Kindle competitor (Daylight)
Studied CS, Education, and Business at Stanford
Advisors and investors include the founder of Goodreads, the Head of Marketing at Notion, the founder of Twitch, book influencers, and authors of books that have sold millions of copies.
The Work
Brainstorming new features with the product team (e.g. "We should show which books are currently available on Kindle Unlimited"), then working backwards on how to get the data required
Sourcing data, e.g. scraping tens of millions of web pages per month
Cleaning data, e.g. rewriting millions of book titles and descriptions or deduping tens of millions of book covers
Refining schemas and establishing novel taxonomies as edge cases and new use cases like localization occur
Developing human-in-the-loop processes to fix user-reported data issues
FAQ
Stack? SwiftUI, Supabase, GraphQL, TypeScript, Next.js, Vercel, Python
Compensation range? 120-160k cash, 0.5-0.8% equity, US health insurance
In-person? 2 days/week in-person in SF strongly preferred
Runway? 3+ years
Monetization strategy? Subscriptions, book sales, publishing
Product references? Spotify, Duolingo, Netflix, Day One, Instagram Stories
Why now? LLMs, BookTok, self-publishing, creator economy, enshittification of socials
Books recs? Gideon the Ninth, Braiding Sweetgrass, Blindness