Applied AI Engineer

Tolan is an Embodied Companion - a cute AI alien you talk with naturally, like a friend. Tolans have their own personality and preferences, and over time form memories about you, your life, and your shared friendship.

We're an experienced team that previously founded Even, acquired for $300M in 2022. Tolan is backed by the designers and founders behind Instagram, Retro, Behance, Vimeo, and Notion. Our team works hard, with an emphasis on autonomy and ownership. We're building together in-person in downtown SF.
The Applied AI Team

The Applied AI Team is responsible for the experiments, evals, and prompts that power the product and bring Tolans to life. Your colleagues include behavioral researchers, science fiction writers, game designers, and operators with experience scaling systems to serve millions of users.
The Role

You'll craft, deploy, and evaluate the prompts that shape Tolan personality and behavior. You'll work closely with design and engineering to develop new features and tune existing ones. A typical day involves creative writing, AI-assisted prompt development/deployment, and testing via both vibes and evals.

This role is equal parts writing craft and technical intuition. You're shaping how an AI character feels to talk to-its voice, its personality, its emotional range.

Who We're Looking For

You're a builder and creative who uses AI to bring your ideas into the world. Maybe you've shipped side projects, hacked together tools for your own workflow, or spent weekends seeing what you could get an LLM to do. The specific outputs matter less than the impulse: you see AI as a creative medium and you've been actively exploring it.

You probably have an unusual background. Writers who learned to vibe code. Engineers who write fiction. People who've built weird things and put them on the internet. We care less about credentials and more about evidence that you make stuff.

The best candidates for this role:

• Have a genuine creative practice-writing, art, game design, etc
• Default to building when they want to learn something new
• Think in systems-always looking for ways to automate or improve workflows
• Have experience creating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments (founders and early startup employees tend to thrive here)