Founding AI Engineer

Role overview

A founding-engineer opening for a remote, full-time role building conversational AI oriented around relational competence rather than engagement metrics. The position sits at the seam between a high-level decision layer and the runtime that delivers natural, growth-serving dialogue. It is aimed at someone who wants to shape a category-defining product from the earliest stage.

Responsibilities

- Construct a real-time emotional-state processing system covering text, voice, timing, and interaction patterns, including escalation and de-escalation tracking that feeds upstream decisioning. - Translate high-level coaching choices into conversation that balances warmth with productive friction via adaptive prompting and constrained generation. - Stand up cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP using PostgreSQL and vector stores, with privacy-preserving pipelines and selective on-device computation. - Build long-horizon memory subsystems for relational context, including storage, retrieval, consistency checks, and longitudinal user modeling. - Coordinate multiple LLM providers (for example Mistral and Claude), tuning latency and designing graceful fallback strategies for live dialogue. - Develop evaluation harnesses that measure relational outcomes instead of fluency, plus tracing, feedback loops, and A/B testing for interventions.

Requirements

- Production-grade Python with async programming and clean architecture. - Hands-on LLM integration experience spanning prompting, constrained generation, and orchestration. - Working familiarity with emotion or affect classifiers built on transformer backbones. - Practical experience operating AWS or GCP infrastructure with PostgreSQL and vector stores. - Background with evaluation infrastructure: harnesses, tracing, and feedback loops. - Ability to translate academic papers into working implementations. - Comfort designing for multimodal inputs. - Readiness for an early-stage startup tempo.

Nice to have

- Background in utility theory or behavioral economics. - Reinforcement learning experience. - Prior work in game AI or dialogue systems. - Rust proficiency.

Benefits and work setup

- Remote, full-time role with competitive compensation and founding equity.