Founding Machine Learning Engineer

About Booko

Booko (YC W26) helps businesses that sell bookable time slots make more money through dynamic pricing. Unlike physical inventory, unsold time slots disappear forever - yet most time-slot-based businesses still rely on static pricing. We integrate with existing booking systems to adjust prices and incentives based on historical utilization, availability, and demand. Early customers see ~20% revenue uplift by selling time that would have otherwise gone unsold.

We're dynamically pricing the whole economy - starting with the massive, underserved market of time-based businesses.

Why join Booko?

Real traction: Our customers are already seeing measurable revenue uplift

Huge market: Every business selling time slots - from fitness studios to salons to clinics - is a potential customer

Fundraising: Recently raised ~$4.3M to go as fast as we can. Backed by Y Combinator with access to the top startup network in the world.

Ground floor: You'll be one of the first hires, working directly with the founders to shape the company's trajectory

Why Booko?

Booko gives every service business the revenue superpowers that, until now, only the largest companies in the world could afford.

Every hour that goes unsold converts to zero. Uber, airlines and hotels solved this with a hundred math PhDs figuring out demand and pricing. The rest of the service economy - fitness studios, med-spas, event and entertainment venues, salons, tours, anything you can book - has the same problem. They just haven't had the hundred math PhDs.

AI collapsed that cost. Booko embeds into the systems a business already runs on, builds a superintelligent brain around its demand, and deploys that intelligence across the business - dynamic pricing first, then marketing, staffing, and scheduling. It runs quietly in the background like a revenue team they never had.

You used to need a hundred math PhDs. Now you don't.

Role Overview:

You will own the models and decision systems behind Booko's pricing engine. This is not a research role separated from the product. You will frame ambiguous problems, build the math, test it against real behavior, and ship it into production.

We are looking for someone with strong mathematical taste, high agency, and the range to deploy and iterate on these models.

What You’ll Do:

• Train demand-forecasting and pricing models for sparse, noisy, changing data
• Develop optimization and decision systems that choose prices and incentives
• Design experiments and measurement systems that tell us what actually works
• Build evaluation and monitoring for models running across many customers
• Help shape the engineering culture and roadmap as an early hire

What You Have:

• Unusually strong in applied math, statistics, ML, optimization, or a related field
• Turns open-ended questions into clear models and experiments
• Deep care for causality, calibration, failure modes, and production behavior
• Strong appetite for ownership

What we offer:

• Competitive, top-of-market salary
• Equity with real upside - you're joining early, and your equity reflects that
• Relocation support to San Francisco
• M5 Pro MacBook Pro and whatever else you need
• All meals covered (coffee, lunch, dinner, snacks)
• Regular team offsites

Know someone exceptional? We pay a $5,000 referral bonus for a successful full-time engineering hire.