Founding Product Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About the Role

An early-stage ambient intelligence startup is hiring a Founding Product Engineer to own the entire product surface end-to-end. You'll work across phone, watch, and desktop — building both the user-facing experience and the underlying AI agent and speech recognition pipeline beneath it. This is a generalist role for someone who combines deep product judgment with the technical range to ship across the full stack, with minimal spec and maximum ownership.

You'll work directly with the Head of Product, turning rough ideas into shipped features and making real trade-offs on the fly. If you thrive in ambiguity and love seeing your work in users' hands quickly, this role is built for you.

What You'll Do

• Own features end-to-end across mobile, desktop, wearable, and the agent/ASR pipeline underneath them.

• Work directly with the Head of Product to turn rough asks into shipped product — without waiting for a detailed spec.

• Make independent UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML trade-offs based on what each feature actually needs.

• Ship improvements to ASR latency and accuracy, wearable reliability, cross-platform meeting detection, and agent responsiveness.

• Take features from design through ship through iteration, driven by real user feedback.

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

What We're Looking For

Required:

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

• Demonstrated capability across UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML — with shipped features across at least two of: mobile, desktop, wearable, or backend.

• Founding or early-stage startup engineering experience (pre-Series B or equivalent scale).

• Full-stack product development: ability to make independent trade-offs and ship with minimal specification.

• Real-time and streaming systems experience — has built or shipped features requiring low-latency or continuous data pipelines.

• Mobile platform development (iOS, Android, or cross-platform frameworks) with shipped consumer applications.

• Backend systems development — has designed and shipped server-side features, APIs, or agent systems.

• Strong product sense: ability to identify what's worth building and execute without detailed specs.

Nice to Have:

• iOS or watchOS development experience with shipped applications.

• Speech, audio, or ASR ML pipeline experience.

• AI-native consumer application experience — shipped features in LLM-powered or agent-based products.

• Agent or LLM feature-building experience — agentic workflows or LLM-based features in production.

• Hardware-adjacent or wearable startup background.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $200,000 USD annually

• Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding team role

• Visa sponsorship is not available for this position

Location

• Hybrid — based in San Francisco, CA

• In-person collaboration expected; not a fully remote role