Founding Staff Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in India.

📋 Description

• Collaborate closely with the founders and the founding product designer to develop, launch, and swiftly enhance the consumer storytelling product.

• Oversee the entire product lifecycle, from the database to the user-facing interface.

• Utilize coding agents for implementation while prioritizing product decisions, conducting experiments, and establishing suitable AI trust boundaries.

• Manage the production loop, which encompasses data modeling, streaming, background tasks, concurrency, payments, credit ledgers, deployment, and observability.

• Ensure that each interaction is reconstructable after it occurs.

• Create benchmarks and evaluations for continuity, character behavior, narrative quality, and potential failure modes.

• Design memory and context systems for narratives extending across hundreds of turns.

• Determine model responsibilities, retrieval processes, orchestration, costs, and latency considerations.

• Experiment with simple approaches on internal test cases prior to developing custom systems.

• Establish sustainable engineering standards for future hires and agent-assisted development.

• Work in partnership with founders, advisors, and product design to test methodologies and enhance the product based on real reader behavior.

⛳️ Requirements

• In-depth experience in production engineering.

• Proficiency in building with models, context, memory, and evaluations as an integral aspect of your workflow.

• Several years of experience as a full-stack product engineer (preferred).

• Background as one of the initial engineers at an early-stage company (preferred).

• Strong technical academic background, such as from IIT, NIT, IIIT, or BITS (preferred).

• Proven experience in shipping consumer products from start to finish.

• Familiarity with developing and operating a production system centered around language models.

• Skills in diagnosing and resolving issues encountered by real users.

• Capability to design experiments prior to constructing custom infrastructure.

• Aptitude for creating meaningful evaluations.

• Strong skills in databases, APIs, concurrency, background tasks, and production reliability.

• Design intuition and confidence in making decisions without a predefined specification.

• Genuine passion for product retention and user experience.

• Ability to articulate complex technical decisions in straightforward language.

• Comfort in challenging founders and advisors.

• Willingness to take on broad responsibilities and progress toward the Head of Engineering role.

• Familiarity with TypeScript, Next.js, and Postgres (expected stack).

• Experience with frontier models via APIs and background jobs (expected stack).

🏝️ Benefits

• Founding-level equity, designed for a technical leader rather than a typical early hire.

• Fully remote work environment.

• Provision of tooling, computing resources, and model budget to conduct real experiments.

• Direct access to founders, a founding product designer, a former CTO, and senior technical advisors.

• Clearly defined growth path within the business, with potential advancement to Head of Engineering.