Founding Product Engineer

Summary

In this role, you’ll have end-to-end ownership over our entire product. We are still in the very earliest stages of development, so you’ll have the ability to shape our product from beginning to end—not just the technologies that we use, but also the overall direction of our product. You will be responsible for everything to do with product, from user interviews, to prototype development, to ensuring that we have a smooth process for deploying changes.

This role is a particularly good fit for anyone who either has previously been, or would like to be, a founder of a software product company. We are looking primarily for judgment—for someone who can understand what actually matters and then make that happen.

Example projects

• Conduct user interviews and ask insightful questions while shadowing current or potential users.

• Implement rough prototypes for potential product ideas or iterations.

• Collect, parse, and ideate on feedback generated from both internal and external users.

• Quickly assemble code abstractions to enable fast iteration, and exercise judgment to delete code that doesn’t contribute as strongly to product fit.

• Ship backend and frontend code against various interfaces (web, CLI, IDE, etc.).

• Develop a good taste for sensible design decisions that elevate a promising idea into something that solves problems for real users.

• In summary: build lots of versions of product prototypes based on what actually clicks with users.

You are

• Motivated by solving real problems for real customers.

• Energized by understanding and talking to users.

• Able to work independently and without explicit directions.

• A great software engineer. You will need to write a considerable amount of software across the stack.

• Familiar with Python.

• Either experienced or interested in being a founder of a software product company.

Compensation and Benefits

• Work directly on creating software with human-like intelligence.

• Generous compensation, equity, and benefits.

• $20K+ yearly budget for self-improvement: coaching, courses, conferences, etc.

• Actively co-create and participate in a positive, intentional team culture.

• Spend time learning, reading papers, and deeply understanding prior work.

• Frequent team events, dinners, off-sites, and hanging out.

• Compensation packages are highly variable based on a variety of factors. If your salary requirements fall outside of the stated range, we still encourage you to apply. The range for this role is $170,000–$350,000 cash, $10,000–$2,000,000 in equity

How to apply

All submissions are reviewed by a person, so we encourage you to include notes on why you're interested in working with us. If you have any other work that you can showcase (open source code, side projects, etc.), certainly include it! We know that talent comes from many backgrounds, and we aim to build a team with diverse skillsets that spike strongly in different areas.

We try to reply either way within a week or two at most (usually much sooner).

About us

Imbue builds AI systems that reason and code, enabling AI agents to accomplish larger goals and safely work in the real world. We train our own foundation models optimized for reasoning and prototype agents on top of these models. By using these agents extensively, we gain insights into improving both the capabilities of the underlying models and the interaction design for agents.

We aim to rekindle the dream of the *personal* computer, where computers become truly intelligent tools that empower us, giving us freedom, dignity, and agency to pursue the things we love.