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Founding Product Engineer

Project Crete, Inc.

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.
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Vacancy posted 1 day ago
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