The Persona Labs

ABOUT

The Persona Labs is building a new kind of social platform focused on something most social products do not explicitly optimize for: helping people become real friends.

We want to help people discover interesting people around them, find meaningful common ground, start low-pressure interactions, continue promising conversations, create shared experiences, and ultimately build real-life friendships.

DISCOVER → CURIOSITY → COMPATIBILITY → INTERACTION → UNDERSTAND → IRL EXPERIENCE → FRIENDSHIP

THE AI LAYER - COMPANION INTELLIGENCE

Alongside the platform, we are building a proactive personal AI companion that learns about the user and helps them navigate this journey through personalized recommendations, suggestions, reminders, conversations, and experiences. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are looking for a Founding ML Engineer to build the intelligence layer of the platform from the ground up. This is a 0→1 Applied AI / ML role where you will work directly with the founder and Product Engineer to turn ambiguous problems around users, relationships, recommendations and personal intelligence into working systems.

You will be expected to:

Understand the problem → identify the signals → design the intelligence system → prototype → evaluate → deploy → learn → improve.

WHAT YOU WILL BUILD & OWN

USER INTELLIGENCE

User representations, behavioural models, interests, preferences, contextual signals, and evolving understanding of the user. MEMORY Short- and long-term memory, episodic/preference/relationship memory, retrieval, relevance and updating.

RECOMMENDATION & MATCHING

People discovery, compatibility, activity/experience recommendations, and personalized ranking.

INTENT & INTEREST

Infer what the user is trying to do and learn what they care about from behaviour, not only declared interests.

RANKING

Decide what should appear first across potentially thousands of relevant people, activities or experiences.

CONTENT INTELLIGENCE

Classification, toxicity, spam, policy signals, quality, relevance, and semantic understanding.

RELATIONSHIP INTELLIGENCE

Reciprocity, interaction health, shared interests, progression, declining engagement and shared activity.

NEXT-BEST-ACTION

Determine the most useful action now: show a person, suggest a question, recommend an activity, reconnect, or do nothing.

TRUST / SAFETY INTELLIGENCE

Fake-account signals, spam, abuse, behavioural anomalies, risky interactions and moderation assistance.

COMPANION INTELLIGENCE

Use signals and outputs to help the companion decide what to say, suggest, recommend or not do. 

WHAT YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE

• Translate ambiguous product problems into ML/AI system designs.

• Build models and intelligence pipelines using behavioural, relational and contextual signals.

• Develop recommendation, matching and personalization systems.

• Design memory and retrieval systems that help the companion understand the user over time.

• Build and evaluate LLM-powered and agentic workflows.

• Decide when to use traditional ML, rules, retrieval, ranking or LLMs.

• Prototype quickly, test assumptions and iterate based on real user behaviour.

• Work closely with the founder and Product Engineer to turn intelligence into product experiences.

• Design APIs and production systems that bring ML/AI capabilities into the application.

• Build evaluation, monitoring and feedback loops so the intelligence improves over time.

WHO SHOULD APPLY

• Experience: 0–4 years’ experience, including exceptional fresh graduates. Strong 1–3 year engineers and experienced 3–4 year product builders are welcome.

• Strong foundations in ML, Python, statistics and software engineering.

• Evidence of Building: Experience with AI/ML projects, recommendation systems, LLM applications or personalization is highly valued.

• Strong evidence of building: Shipped projects, research, hackathons, internships, open source or startup work. 

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

MACHINE LEARNING DEPTH

Can you understand the modelling problem underneath the application?

RECOMMENDATION & PERSONALIZATION

Can you reason about relevance, ranking, cold start and behavioural signals?

AI ENGINEERING

Can you turn LLMs and agents into reliable product capabilities rather than simple API wrappers?

USER INTELLIGENCE

Can you design systems that gradually understand a person from sparse and changing signals?

SYSTEMS THINKING

Can you move from a model to a production system with APIs, data, latency, cost and monitoring?

EVALUATION MINDSET

Can you determine whether the intelligence actually helped the user?

PRODUCT JUDGMENT

Can you decide what the system should do when there is no predefined answer?

SPEED OF EXECUTION

Can you move from idea → prototype → evaluation → production quickly and responsibly?

BUILD WITH US

You will join at a stage where many of the answers do not exist yet. You will not simply implement a model someone else selected; you will help decide how the product learns to understand people.

CAREERS:

Apply with your resume, GitHub, portfolio or shipped work.

https://forms.gle/12YpUSBY2Sqs5xjp8

www.thepersonalabs.com

ABOUT

The Persona Labs is building a new kind of social platform focused on something most social products do not explicitly optimize for: helping people become real friends.

We want to help people discover interesting people around them, find meaningful common ground, start low-pressure interactions, continue promising conversations, create shared experiences, and ultimately build real-life friendships.

DISCOVER → CURIOSITY → COMPATIBILITY → INTERACTION → UNDERSTAND → IRL EXPERIENCE → FRIENDSHIP

THE AI LAYER

Alongside the platform, we are building a proactive personal companion that learns about the user and helps them navigate this journey through personalized recommendations, suggestions, reminders and experiences.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are looking for a Founding Product Engineer to help build the platform from the ground up. This is a 0→1 product engineering role where you work directly with the founder and engineering team to turn ambiguous product problems into working software.

You will be expected to:

Understand the problem → explore solutions → make trade-offs → design → build → ship → measure → improve.

WHAT YOU WILL BUILD & OWN

MOBILE

Onboarding, profiles, discovery, interactions, messaging, activities, and companion experiences.

SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Relationships, social graph, compatibility, and interaction flows.

BACKEND

APIs, services, authentication, notifications, and background processes.

DATA

PostgreSQL models, user/activity data, analytics, and behavioural signals.

REAL-TIME

Messaging, live interactions, notifications, and event-driven workflows.

AI-ENABLED

Recommendations, personalization, and companion-powered experiences.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Cloud deployment, CI/CD, monitoring, reliability, and cost management.

WHAT YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE

• Build and ship mobile and full-stack product features end-to-end.

• Design APIs, database models, and backend services for a social product.

• Translate ambiguous product problems into simple, reliable technical solutions.

• Make architecture and engineering trade-offs for performance, scalability, security, and cost.

• Work closely with the founder, product/design team, and Companion Intelligence engineer.

• Prototype quickly, test assumptions, and iterate based on user behaviour and product feedback.

• Own features from problem → architecture → implementation → deployment → improvement.

• Help establish engineering practices around testing, monitoring, security, and reliability.

WHO SHOULD APPLY

• Experience: 0–4 years, including exceptional fresh graduates. Strong 1–3 year engineers and experienced 3–4 year product builders are welcome.

• Fundamentals: Strong CS/software engineering fundamentals.

• Evidence of Building: We value what you have built more than the number of years on your résumé. Shipped apps, strong side projects, hackathons, internships, open source, or startup work are highly valued.

• Mindset: High ownership, curiosity, strong fundamentals, clear communication, learning velocity, and the ability to work through ambiguity.

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

MOBILE CAPABILITY

Can you build and ship a polished mobile experience?

ENGINEERING DEPTH

Do you understand why a system works, not just how to make it run?

PRODUCT JUDGMENT

Can you determine what should be built when the problem is ambiguous?

ARCHITECTURE / SYSTEMS

Can you reason across APIs, databases, services, real-time systems, scale, and cost?

SPEED OF EXECUTION

Can you move from idea → prototype → production quickly without compromising fundamentals?

AI FAMILIARITY

Do you understand how modern AI can become a useful, reliable product capability?

BUILD WITH US

You will join at a stage where many answers do not exist yet. You will not simply implement someone else’s architecture, you will help decide what the architecture and product should become.

CAREERS:

Apply with your resume, GitHub, portfolio or shipped work.

https://forms.gle/12YpUSBY2Sqs5xjp8

www.thepersonalabs.com