San Francisco, CA · full time · senior level
## About the role Join Empathic as our founding engineer and literally employee #1, working directly with a Thiel Fellow founder to build the future of AI-human connection. You'll collaborate closely with the founder, design, and early engineering hires to create a groundbreaking real-time AI video call experience, shaping both product and engineering culture from day one. ## What you'll do - Build and own core systems for memory, retrieval, proactivity, and responsiveness in our AI-driven application. - Integrate and optimize cutting-edge real-time video generation and audio synthesis models. - Collaborate with the founder and design team to iterate rapidly on product features and user experience. - Set the bar for engineering quality, code standards, and technical excellence across the stack. - Recruit and mentor future world-class engineering talent as the team grows. - Dogfood the product extensively, providing feedback and driving continuous improvement. - Leverage agentic coding and AI tools to accelerate development, testing, and validation. - Contribute to system architecture decisions and long-term technical vision. ## What we're looking for - 3+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 1 year in a senior or lead capacity. - Deep technical expertise in Python, with a preference for typed scientific Python. - Experience with real-time video processing, audio synthesis, or related AI/ML models. - Strong background in building memory, retrieval, or voice systems. - Demonstrated ability to set high standards for code quality and system design. - Early adopter of agentic coding and AI-assisted development workflows. - Highly productive, self-driven, and comfortable with radical transparency and ownership. - Excited by the fast pace and ambiguity of early-stage startups. ## Nice to have - Experience training or deploying vision or video models in production. - Prior work on consumer-facing AI products or conversational interfaces. - Familiarity with iOS/Android native app integration (e.g., iMessage, Facetime). - Background in recruiting or building early-stage engineering teams. - Contributions to open-source AI or video/audio frameworks. ## What you'll get - Significant equity ownership and the chance to shape a company from the ground up. - Opportunity to work on a product with massive consumer impact and immediate feedback. - Close collaboration with a high-caliber founder and team in an engineering-first culture. - Ownership of technical decisions and the ability to set engineering standards. - The chance to do the best work of your career and help define the future of AI-human interaction. ## How to apply Apply directly using the link — our AI interview will be the first step.