We're looking for a backend engineer to join an early-stage pre-seed startup, based between San Francisco and Reno, Nevada.
Our mission
84% of luxury travel decisions come from referrals. The people who make those referrals earn $0. Travel agents who have never been on the experience earn 15–25%.
LINX rebuilds that loop on trust — and rewards the people who actually drive the bookings.
Founder
Stein Retzlaff. Ten years opening the most exclusive experiences on the planet — 100+ expeditions across all seven continents. More Antarctica ski films than anyone on the planet. 44 projects between the Arctic and Antarctica. 100+ operator relationships including vessels and lodges worldwide.
Examples of Stein's production work →
Being built by the leaders of the industry.
The CEOs of EYOS Expeditions and Ice Axe Expeditions, among other founding operators.
Traction
- MVP built
- Desktop web-based
A high-level view of what we're building
A multi-axis trust graph. Each traveler, curator, operator, and experience carries an embedding across eight axes — taste · trust · context · occasion · relationship · geography · time · verified outcome. Typed edges with confidence, provenance, and consent class on every row.
Current stack: Kotlin / Spring Boot / PostgreSQL + pgvector / Redis. Next.js / TypeScript. AWS + Terraform.
Core
- Backend engineering — Kotlin / JVM, or a strong portable systems background (Go, Rust, Scala)
- Data architecture instincts — modeling real-world systems for query and growth
- Graph thinking — entities, relationships, events as a unit of design
- Ability to ship end-to-end and debug from first principles
- Graph databases · knowledge graphs · pgvector
- ML training & fine-tuning
- Multi-LLM orchestration for ingestion and inference
- Time-series & anomaly detection
Example classes
- Stanford CS224W — Machine Learning with Graphs
- Harvard CS165 — Data Systems
- MIT 6.5840 — Distributed Systems
- Berkeley CS186 — Database Systems
Open questions we're working on
- Multi-hop trust paths — how to score trust through 2nd and 3rd connections?
- Signal decay over time — what's the right model and how do we validate it?
- Taste similarity — what distance function captures it best?
Compensation
Early engineer compensation. Cash plus potential equity.
Apply
Stein Retzlaff
Founder, LINX
steinretzlaff@gmail.com · 530.386.5371