Founding Staff Engineer

• Work directly with the founders and founding product designer to build, launch and rapidly improve the product
• Ship the complete product from database to reader-facing interface
• Use coding agents for implementation while focusing on product decisions, experiments and AI trust boundaries
• Own the production loop, including data modeling, streaming, background work, concurrency, payments, credit ledger, deployment and observability
• Ensure production events are reconstructable for diagnosing failures
• Develop benchmarks and evaluations for continuity, character behavior, narrative quality and failure modes
• Design memory and context systems for stories spanning hundreds of turns
• Select and assign models to different tasks
• Own retrieval, orchestration, cost and latency decisions
• Establish maintainable engineering standards around agents
• Test multiple approaches rapidly and make evidence-based product and infrastructure decisions

• 5+ years of experience
• Real production engineering depth
• Ability to build with models, context, memory and evals
• Experience shipping consumer products end to end
• Experience building and operating production systems with language models at their core
• Experience diagnosing and fixing failures with real users
• Ability to design experiments before building custom infrastructure
• Ability to build meaningful evaluations
• Strong knowledge of databases, APIs, concurrency, background work and production reliability
• Design instinct and confidence making product decisions without a detailed specification
• Genuine interest in product retention and user experience
• Ability to explain complex technical decisions in plain English
• Comfortable challenging founders and advisers
• Preferred: several years as a full-stack product engineer
• Preferred: experience as one of the first engineers at an early-stage company
• Preferred: strong technical education such as IIT, NIT, IIIT or BITS
• TypeScript, Next.js and Postgres experience
• Experience with frontier models over APIs and background jobs
• Must-have skills: Large language models, Backend, System Design
• Good-to-have skills: AI agents, LLM Evaluation, Full-Stack Development

• Tooling, compute and model budget for real experiments
• Founders available daily and technical advisers available as a sounding board
• Broad ownership and a path to Head of Engineering as the team grows