Founding Product Engineer

📋 Description

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