About the Role
An early-stage, AI-native consumer startup in the ambient intelligence space is hiring a Founding Product Engineer to own its product surface end-to-end — across phone, watch, and desktop — along with the underlying agent and ASR pipeline. You'll work directly with the Head of Product to make real-time tradeoffs across UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML, turning loosely scoped ideas into shipped features.
This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you'll shape both the core user experience and the technical foundation of a product at its earliest and most formative stage. If you thrive on autonomy, move fast, and have strong product instincts to match your engineering depth, this role was built for you.
What You'll Do
Own features end-to-end across phone, watch, and desktop, plus the agent and ASR pipeline underneath them.
Work directly with the Head of Product to make real product tradeoffs on the fly across UX, UI, and backend.
Turn a Slack thread or one-line ask into shipped product with minimal spec.
Make independent UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML decisions based on what each feature actually needs.
Ship improvements across ASR latency, small-word accuracy, watch tap-target and voice-print reliability, cross-platform meeting detection, and agent responsiveness.
Take features from design through launch 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.
What We're Looking For
Required:
2+ years of full-time software engineering experience shipping consumer features end-to-end.
Genuine capability across UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML — with consumer features shipped across at least two of: mobile, desktop, wearable, or backend.
Founding or early-stage engineering experience.
Experience building or shipping real-time or streaming systems.
A track record of shipping features from minimal specs through design, launch, and post-launch iteration based on user feedback.
Strong product sense paired with meaningful technical depth.
Ownership mentality and a strong bias toward action.
Nice to Have:
iOS, watchOS, or wearable development experience.
Speech, audio, or ASR ML pipeline experience.
Prior AI-native consumer app work, agent/LLM feature-building, or hardware-adjacent startup background.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation details are available during the interview process. This is a full-time, founding-team role with equity commensurate with early-stage impact and ownership.
Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
This role is based in San Francisco, CA with a hybrid in-office arrangement. Remote-only candidates are not a fit at this time.