Software Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA

Work Policy: Primarily in-office, typically 3 to 4 days per week

Visa: Transfers supported

About the Role

A well-funded AI company is hiring Product Engineers to build new developer-facing products from zero to one. This is not a narrow backend, frontend, or infrastructure role. You will work across the full product stack, speak directly with users, prototype new ideas quickly, make product decisions, and take ownership from initial concept through production. The team is looking for engineers who think more like founders than feature executors. You should be comfortable entering ambiguous problem spaces, deciding what is worth building, and then moving quickly enough to test whether you were right.

Responsibilities

• Build new products from zero to one
• Work across backend and frontend systems
• Develop interfaces across web, CLI, IDE, and developer tooling environments
• Prototype new product ideas quickly
• Speak directly with users to understand pain points and opportunities
• Translate customer feedback into product and engineering decisions
• Design abstractions that enable rapid experimentation
• Make pragmatic decisions around what to build, improve, or remove
• Take ownership of projects without requiring detailed direction
• Contribute directly to product roadmap and technical direction
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product design
• Build high-quality, tested production software

Requirements

• 2+ years of strong software engineering experience
• Strong generalist engineering ability
• Experience working across different parts of the stack
• Strong Python skills
• Experience with React and TypeScript
• Strong data structures and algorithms fundamentals
• Ability to write clean, high-quality, tested code
• Strong product intuition and engineering judgement
• Comfortable speaking with users and understanding customer problems
• High autonomy and ability to operate without explicit instructions
• Strong communication and problem-solving skills
• Evidence of curiosity and willingness to challenge assumptions
• Comfortable working primarily in-office in San Francisco

Strong Background Signals

Particularly relevant backgrounds include:

• Early-stage startup engineering
• Founding engineer experience
• Previous founder experience
• Developer tooling
• Open-source projects
• Products built specifically for engineers
• Code generation or AI developer tooling
• Experience building complex technical products
• Strong engineering environments
• Teaching or technical mentorship experience
• Experience moving between startup and larger engineering environments

The Kind of Engineer Who Does Well Here

You are probably a strong fit if you:

• Prefer building new things over maintaining established systems
• Enjoy talking to users as much as thinking about architecture
• Can move from a rough idea to a working prototype quickly
• Care about product quality, not just technical elegance
• Can identify which details matter and which ones do not
• Are comfortable deleting work when the evidence says it is the wrong direction
• Like owning problems rather than waiting for a roadmap
• Could realistically see yourself founding a software company one day

Example Problems

You could work on products involving:

• AI-assisted developer workflows
• Coding agents
• Agent management systems
• Automated code review
• Developer productivity tooling
• Sandboxed execution environments
• CLI tooling
• IDE integrations
• Agent evaluation and optimization
• Systems that connect AI agents with external APIs and developer environments

Why Consider It

• Founder-level ownership: Engineers are expected to propose ideas, shape projects, and influence product direction rather than simply execute predefined tickets.
• Build from zero: You will have genuine opportunities to create entirely new products, interfaces, and workflows.
• Small, technical team: The company has substantial financial backing while maintaining a relatively small engineering organization, creating significant individual leverage.
• Strong technical environment: The hiring bar is high, with emphasis on exceptional coding ability, product judgement, curiosity, and independence.
• Sustainable pace: The company intentionally avoids the extreme-hours culture common across many frontier AI startups.
• High upside: Compensation includes a strong base salary and meaningful equity, with scope increasing significantly for engineers who demonstrate outsized impact.

Pay

Base salary: $170K to $350K

Additional compensation: Equity (depends on experience, technical ability, and expected scope)