Founding Engineering Lead ($160k-$200k + Equity) at OpenWhispr

About the role

OpenWhispr is an open-source AI startup building the future of voice-first work, offering users the choice between local privacy and high-speed cloud inference. As a Founding Engineering Lead reporting to founder Gabe, you will own architecture for a product with 150,000+ downloads, lead 3-4 engineers while shipping core code, and solve complex problems across local speech-to-text, latency reduction, and AI agent integrations. The role is based in San Francisco or Chicago, USA.

Responsibilities

• Act as a player‑coach, spending the majority of your time writing high‑impact code while leading and unblocking a team of 3‑4 engineers.
• Architect and maintain complex voice pipelines, optimizing for latency and accuracy across diverse hardware and software environments.
• Define engineering standards for the company, including code review processes, testing frameworks, and high‑leverage AI‑assisted workstreams.

Requirements

• Roughly five years of engineering experience with a track record of leading small teams to ship polished consumer‑facing software.

Skills

• Deep product craft and design taste, with a bias toward simplifying complex systems rather than adding unnecessary features.
• Proven ability to manage parallel AI‑assisted workstreams effectively while maintaining rigorous quality and avoiding AI slop.

Benefits

• Lead a product with massive existing traction: 150,000+ downloads and an active open‑source community that cares deeply about the product's evolution.
• Tackle rare technical challenges: balance high‑accuracy cloud inference with private, local speech‑to‑text and language models running on any machine.
• Founding‑level impact: report directly to the founder, Gabe, and define the engineering culture, hiring practices, and technical roadmap for the company's next phase.

Pay

$160k‑$200k base salary plus equity.