Founding Engineer

tl;dr: This is a 1 of 1 role. We're looking for a founding engineer to work alongside a Thiel Fellow founder as literally employee #1. Great compensation, equity, and perks.

About Empathic

“…but I tell you all today, I would rather die a man than live for all eternity a machine.”

-Bicentennial Man (Asimov, 1976)

The world is trending towards fewer, shallower friendships, meaning more lonely people and less social contact than ever before. Empathic is creating a great friend for everyone on Earth, by digitizing connection, in what we think could be the biggest cultural transition of our lifetime.

Most AI “conversation” today is a robotic, sterile, turn-based interface. We’re building a realistic real-time video call medium where AI can be present and proactive, to connect with users. Users will connect not on a new destination, but the iMessage, Facetime, and other native apps they already love.

We're well funded (BoxGroup) and the founder is a Thiel Fellow, YC alum, Stanford dropout who recently sold his last company.

We are building an engineering-first organization of the highest quality, fully in-person in San Francisco. Think a room full of only the smartest people you've met, doing the best work of your life.

Who you are

* People regularly describe you as one of the most productive and driven engineers they've met.

* You know that the margins are the difference between good and great, and you always push for great.

* You were probably one of the first early adopters of agentic coding, and use AI gen to move faster in all aspects of development, from writing to reviewing to testing to validation.

* But you developed deep technical experience pre-AI, and have developed strong opinions on systems, code quality, and the craft of software development.

* You are self-aware, independent, and value radical transparency

Why you should join

* You’re excited by the beautiful chaos and occasional late nights of the earliest stage.

* You’ll have 4-10x more equity ownership than other “founding" engineer roles

* You’ll be building a product meant for millions of consumers, with immediate unfiltered feedback, instead of siloed enterprises.

* You want to do the best work of your life with a team you’ll remember. If we’re successful you’ll shape the interface for AI-human connection.

What you’ll do

* Work on all aspects of our application with our founder, design, and other engineers.

* Build new systems for memory, retrieval, proactivity, responsiveness, and more

* Work on and integrate the latest internal and external real-time video generation and audio synthesis models

* Create the bar for engineering quality and help recruit world-class talent.

* Dogfood the product extensively, because you care.

Basic qualifications

* 3+ years SWE with 1+ year senior responsibilities

* Big bonus points for experience in training or deploying vision or video models, and previous work on memory or voice systems. Experience with typed scientific Python is a major plus.

Interview process

Our interview process is simple, and we are looking to make the process from start to finish less than one week:

* 20-minute screening call

* 60-minute technical interview

* Half day onsite

* Reference checks

Perks

* Pay range: $150-250k

* Extremely generous equity ownership

* Generous medical/dental/vision, covering most Gold and Platinum plans (via employer ICHRA)

* Free lunch and dinner every day

* Monthly bonus if you live or move close to the office

* 401k plus match