Founding Product Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About the Role

This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage, AI-native consumer startup building an ambient intelligence product that spans phone, watch, and desktop. You'll own the product surface end-to-end — including the underlying agent and ASR pipeline — working directly with the Head of Product to ship real features fast. This role is a rare opportunity to shape the core user experience and technical foundation of a product from the ground up.

The team is small, the scope is wide, and the expectation is that you move with high autonomy and strong product instincts. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

What You'll Do

• Own features end-to-end across phone, watch, and desktop, including the agent and ASR pipeline underneath them.

• Work directly with the Head of Product to make real-time tradeoffs across UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML.

• Turn a Slack thread or a one-line ask into shipped product with minimal spec — no hand-holding required.

• Make independent decisions across the full stack based on what each feature actually needs.

• Ship improvements to ASR latency, small-word accuracy, wearable tap-target and voice-print reliability, cross-platform meeting detection, and agent responsiveness.

• Take features from design through ship through iteration, driven by real user feedback — without waiting to be told the next step.

• Partner closely with Product and Design to prioritize and execute the roadmap.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 2+ years of full-time software engineering experience shipping consumer features end-to-end.

• Proven capability across at least two of: mobile, desktop, wearable, or backend — with real shipped consumer products to show for it.

• Founding or early-stage engineering experience; you know what it means to build before the playbook exists.

• Strong product sense paired with genuine technical depth — you care about what you're building, not just how.

• Experience building or shipping real-time or streaming systems.

• Comfortable shipping from minimal specifications through design, launch, and post-launch iteration.

• Ownership mentality and a strong bias toward action.

• Based in San Francisco with availability for hybrid in-office work.

Nice to Have:

• iOS, watchOS, or wearable development experience.

• Speech, audio, or ASR ML pipeline experience.

• Experience building agent or LLM features, or shipping AI-native consumer applications.

• Hardware-adjacent startup background.

Location

San Francisco, CA — hybrid in-office. This is not a remote role. Candidates must be locally based or willing to relocate.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation details are not listed for this role. As a founding-level hire at an early-stage startup, total compensation is expected to include a competitive equity component in addition to salary. Details will be discussed during the interview process.