Applied AI Engineer

About the Company

A days-old, pre-seed AI company building agents that take ownership of complex objectives and pursue them autonomously for days, months, and eventually indefinitely, a new class of long-running agents that keep making progress toward an outcome instead of stopping after a single task. The founding team includes leaders and founding members from top frontier AI labs and elite quantitative firms. The core thesis is that as agents work over longer horizons, the bottleneck shifts from capability to intent: understanding what a person or organization actually wants, preserving that understanding over time, and knowing when human judgment is truly needed. The first application is self-improving products: agents that learn what customers are trying to accomplish, build and deploy solutions, measure whether they worked, and keep iterating.

About the Role

You'll build the product through which users delegate and oversee complex outcomes, owning major product areas end to end and working closely with research and infrastructure to turn new agent capabilities into reliable, intuitive experiences. This is a zero-to-one, full-stack seat: you'll build across the stack, from user-facing interfaces to agent workflows, model orchestration, and infrastructure. It's a founding-level role on a very early team, so expect to prototype rapidly, make strong product and technical decisions, take ideas from first principles to production, and help shape the product, the technical architecture, and the culture. You'll work directly with users, learn their workflows, and iterate fast.

What You'll Own

• Zero-to-one AI product areas, end to end
• The full-stack build: user-facing interfaces, agent workflows, model orchestration, and infrastructure
• Turning frontier model capabilities into reliable products that solve real user problems
• Direct work with users to understand their workflows and iterate quickly
• Rapid prototyping and strong product and technical decisions, from first principles to production
• Helping shape product, architecture, and culture as an early team member

What We're Looking For

• 2 to 7 years of experience (strong applied and product engineers welcome, with room for exceptional outliers)
• Exceptional engineering ability paired with strong product judgment and taste
• A track record of building successful user-facing products, ideally zero to one
• Strong intuition for turning frontier AI capabilities into simple, useful products
• Comfort across product, engineering, models, and infrastructure. This is not a narrow specialist seat, and backend-only, infra-only, or research-only profiles with no shipped user-facing product are a weaker fit.
• Evidence of exceptional ownership: founding a company, owning a major product, or shipping consequential work at a frontier technology company
• High agency, ambition, speed, and a steep learning curve, with a founder mentality and comfort in a days-old, figure-it-out-yourself environment
• Bonus: experience at an agentic-product company, zero-to-one founder or early-team experience, or a "spike" background such as olympiad (IOI/IMO), quantitative, or world-class competitive achievement

Logistics

San Francisco, in person, with an intense pace (9-9-6). Compensation is $250K to $500K base plus 1% to 5% equity. Visa sponsorship is available. The process includes a paid, in-person work trial of 2 to 3 days on a live product work stream.