Base salary range: $150,000 - $175,000

Total compensation, which includes equity, determined based on experience

About Us

We are an early-stage, deep-tech startup that is revolutionizing the way people write with the help of large language models. We are a team of experienced world-class natural language processing (NLP) researchers, who are at the very forefront of generative models of text, and are passionate about creating innovative solutions to help people communicate more effectively. We believe with the right tools and support, writing does not have to be tedious and time consuming, and that's why we're building writing assistants that leverage the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

If you're passionate about leveraging advances in AI for making users more productive, join our innovative team on our journey!

We have recently spun out of the Incubator at the Allen Institute for AI, a world-class, top-tier research organization in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Who you are:

We are looking for our first full-time engineer at our startup. You are a person who can take ownership of the backend, including design, implementation, deployment, maintenance, and scaling. Fronting experience is desirable, but not required. You are comfortable working in the fast-changing environment of startups. You are familiar with the best engineering practices and have long experience building cloud-based systems from scratch and taking them from 0 to 1, then scaling them. You can find the right balance between simple non-scalable solutions vs. complicated long-term solutions based on the stage of the project. You pay attention to details, and easy to work with, and have some leadership experience.

What you’ll do in this role:

As the founding engineer for our startup, you will have a crucial role in shaping the direction of our engineering efforts. Here are some key responsibilities that you will undertake:

• Design backend architecture, weighing between simplicity vs. scalability
• Build our backend infrastructure on Google Cloud
• Evolve the project plan based on rapidly changing requirements
• Scale the backend as the number of users increases
• Setup logging, monitoring, error reporting and recovery, alerts .. etc
• Setup engineering processes for the backend development, including testing, documentation, issue tracking, and sprint planning
• Optimize the response time of the backend to user queries
• Dealing with services that have different computational requirements, ranging from milli-seconds on CPU to long GPU hours
• Ensuring the backend is secure and safe for the user data
• Work closely with the frontend developers and with the ML team
• Help with recruiting and mentoring future engineering hires

We’d love to hear from you if you have:

• 5+ years of experience building cloud-based applications, ideally on Google Cloud
• Strong experience with backend technologies and languages like Node, Next, and typescript
• Strong experience building all backend components from scratch including databases, data storage, logging, caching, queuing, authentication, continuous integration, deployment, autoscaling, infra-as-code, serverless deployment, …
• Strong communication, planning, and organizational skills

Some experiences that will be very helpful but not required

• Experience with python development
• Experience with resource scheduling
• Experience deploying machine learning models
• Frontend technologies like React, Javascript, HTML/CSS

Best candidates do not always match all criteria of the job description; we encourage you to apply if you think you would be a good fit for the role and are inspired by our mission.

Why you will love working with us:

• Impact — You'll have the chance to make a real impact on a large base of users. Our mission is to make people more productive and save them time by improving their writing experience, and you'll be an integral part of that effort. You'll be able to see the direct results of your work and know that you're making a difference in people's lives.
• Unique Learning Opportunities: You'll have the opportunity to work alongside deep technical founders who are experts in generative AI and NLP. You'll have access to an unparalleled level of expertise and knowledge in this exploding landscape of generative AI. Our team also has deep strong connections to the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and many of the top research institutions in AI, along with access to knowledge sharing amongst the community of hundreds of engineers that work for ai2incubator.com companies.
• “Founding” title, employee #1 — As our first hire and holding the "founding" title, you'll always have the bragging rights of being our Employee #1, no matter how many thousands of people join after you. This achievement is not only an incredible distinction, it'll also look great on your resume.
• Early stage equity —We are offering early stage equity as part of our job opportunity, which comes with inherent risk. However, we strongly believe that our company has the potential to create tremendous value over time, and this is a belief shared by both our founders and the Allen Institute for AI. Joining us at this stage means you have the chance to be a part of something groundbreaking and grow with the company.
• Flexible location and hours – As a distributed team, we offer the opportunity to work from anywhere (with sufficient overlap with pacific time), with a slight preference for Seattle or Southern California. This means you'll have the freedom to work from a location that suits you best, and have control over your work hours. We understand that everyone has different needs and responsibilities, and we want to support a healthy work-life balance for all team members.