Founding Engineer (AI)

About the Company Our client is an AI-powered market research platform that helps organizations run qualitative research at quantitative scale. Leveraging advanced voice AI and automated analysis, they enable businesses to have natural, real-time conversations with hundreds of customers at once — turning months of traditional research into hours of actionable insights. They’re reinventing the way companies understand their customers, transforming a historically underserved but critical function that drives innovation, marketing, and product positioning for major brands. Why Join Them? Explosive growth: They’re seeing rapid traction across mid-market and enterprise, including six-figure deals and fast-moving sales cycles. Clear product-market fit: Most of their wins come from solving real customer pain points, meaning they rarely need to compete on price. A naturally viral product: Insights are easily shared across large teams, creating an organic product-led growth loop. Elite founding team: Their founders come from Google Research, Meta, Amazon, and Samsara, bringing deep experience scaling enterprise and PLG SaaS companies. Huge market opportunity: Demand for modern customer understanding tools is accelerating — and they’re positioned to become the end-to-end platform of choice for fast, high-quality insight generation. The Role: Founding Engineer As a founding engineer, you’ll own major parts of the core product and influence the technical direction from day one. You’ll work across the stack — engineering, research, infrastructure, and product — with work that has immediate and visible impact. What You’ll Do Push the boundaries of applied GenAI: deploy foundation models for dynamic conversations, reasoning, and large-scale thematic analysis. Innovate in voice & speech AI: improve pipelines for voice generation, speech recognition, and real-time conversation orchestration. Build full-stack product experiences: dashboards, collaboration tools, and intuitive workflows that make research faster and easier. Lead the future of agent-led UX: help shape a backend powered by intelligent agents and experiment with generative UI. Scale infrastructure: design systems that support thousands of concurrent AI-mediated interviews, large datasets, and secure enterprise integrations. Establish engineering excellence: define best practices, mentor early hires, and foster a culture of speed, rigor, and craftsmanship. Collaborate cross-functionally: work closely with Growth and Customers to turn feedback into the right product decisions at the right time. What They’re Looking For 5+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, ideally with exposure to ML/AI products or infrastructure. A track record of shipping production systems in fast-paced startup environments (0→1 or 1→10). Strength in one or more of: backend systems, ML/AI pipelines, full-stack web development, or real-time/voice infrastructure. Curiosity and willingness to dive deep into applied R&D — LLMs, voice generation, speech recognition, reasoning models. A high-energy builder mindset with a strong bias for action and comfort with ambiguity. Bonus: experience with enterprise SaaS, insights/research tools, or scaling compute-heavy/AI-heavy systems.