Founding Product Engineer

We're a small team in San Francisco, building personal AIhardware — it runs your agents locally, on hardware you own.Private by physics, not by promise. We hire rarely and deliberately. How we work Humans stay in the loop. AI accelerates the work; architecture, judgment and taste stay human.We don't ship prompt-generated foundations. Hardware and software, one stack. Software alone is no moat. Lasting products are atoms and bitsdesigned together — device, install, service, ecosystem. Three generations deep. Gen one works, gen two refines, gen three scales. We accept earlyniches and early losses; stopping is the only failure. Candor over comfort. Hard truths early, surfaced kindly. Polite lies rot a system.Key calls are made decisively; everything else is yours to own. Story before specs. We start from why it matters to a real person — press releasefirst, features second. Technology serves the narrative, not the reverse. Ethics as a feature. No addiction loops, no dark patterns, no burnout culture.We build for people's lives — including our own. Founding AI/ML Engineer San Francisco · Full-time Make frontier-quality intelligence run beautifully on consumer hardware. Own local inference end to end — quantization, distillation, speculative decoding, memory-efficient serving. Build the agent runtime: tool use, memory, on-device orchestration. Profile and squeeze models across CPU, GPU and NPU targets. You've shipped ML systems people actually used, and you're at home in PyTorch and in low-level performance work alike. Build the edge runtime — schedulers, drivers, acceleration paths across CUDA, Metal, Vulkan and NPU SDKs. Performance engineering end to end: latency, memory, thermals. Fluent in C, C++ or Rust; kernel- or embedded-adjacent backgrounds very welcome. Build the app surfaces — desktop client, web, onboarding and the developer experience. Full-stack TypeScript, with taste for fast, quiet, native-feeling software. You sweat the details users feel, and skip the ones they don't. Define how private, local AI looks and feels. Own product design end to end — flows, UI systems, brand expression. Portfolio over pedigree; motion and visual craft are a plus. You can design in code, or right beside it. #J-18808-Ljbffr Project Crete, Inc.