About TAYA
TAYA is a memory company. We use AI to help people remember what actually happened: what was said, what was promised, the idea you had and lost by lunch.
Our first product is a voice-first AI you can talk to, paired with a wearable made to be worn. Most memory devices end up in a drawer because nobody wants them on their body. Ours is designed to be something you reach for, so it's there when it matters. It captures, holds onto privately, and hands back the moment you need it.
Founded by Elena Wagenmans (ex-Apple, Stanford) and backed by MaC Venture Capital, Female Founders Fund, and a16z Speedrun. We care a lot about taste: how the product looks, feels, and reads is the product. Pre-orders are open ahead of a 2026 launch.
Join us in building AI worth keeping on.
About the Role
We're looking for a founding engineer to own the software at the center of Taya: the app people open every day to capture, search, and relive their memories. We have a working iOS app today. Your job is to take it from working to indispensable.
You'll work directly with Elena, with no layers and no process, and the decisions you make now will define the product for years. This is a software-first role for someone who thinks in products, not tickets, and who measures success by whether people keep coming back.
Responsibilities
Own and evolve the iOS app, the daily driver for someone's entire memory archive
Own onboarding and the first-run experience: get people to their first real memory fast
Own retention: define the metrics that matter, then build the features and loops that move them
Build AI-powered search and retrieval that surfaces the right moment
Improve the capture experience: tap-to-capture, backgrounding, audio handling
Own sync between the wearable and the app over BLE
Integrate AI services and a managed backend (Supabase or similar)
Own a privacy architecture users can trust, on-device wherever possible
Work with Elena across product, design, and GTM to ship, learn, and iterate
Qualifications
3+ years building and shipping consumer iOS software
Strong Swift engineer; SwiftUI, AVFoundation, and the iOS platform feel like home
Shipped at least one consumer app end-to-end, from empty project to App Store
Taste: a strong point of view on how software should look and feel, and a track record of shipping work that shows it
Has owned product metrics, not just features: you've moved retention, activation, or engagement and know how
Comfortable across the stack: APIs, managed services, and frontend
Track record of 0-to-1 building under ambiguity
Strong opinions on privacy and data minimization
Excellent attention to interaction detail
AI-native: you build with Claude Code, Codex, and similar tools daily and get more done because of it
Audio-heavy or real-time app experience is a plus
CoreBluetooth / BLE hardware integration is a plus
On-device ML or Core ML is a plus
Benefits
Founding engineer equity, real ownership from day one
Competitive seed-stage salary
Health, vision, and dental benefits
Direct work with the founder on a product people are already pre-ordering