Founding AI Engineer

📍 NYC — Open to Relocation💼 Full-time or Contract-to-hire💸 Competitive salary + equity — based on experience

About our Company We’re a small team of engineers, creatives, and researchers building new kinds of interactive experiences powered by AI. We’re launching The Interface : a platform for expressive, real-time characters that people can talk to and explore shared worlds alongside. It’s a mix of entertainment and social.

We just wrapped up YC (S25) and raised a sizeable seed round from top investors. Max (CEO) studied MechE at MIT, previously led AI initiatives at McKinsey; Peyton (CTO) is an MIT CS grad and former quant at Citadel. We’re setting up in NYC — a hacker house-style space — and moving quickly toward launch.

About the Role We’re looking for a Founding AI Engineer to build the intelligence layer behind our real-time characters. You’ll be developing low-latency, expressive AI systems — powering voice, personality, and narrative consistency — so that users can have rich, dynamic interactions with characters.

This is a highly creative engineering role : you’ll run experiments across voice models, prompting strategies, and generative systems; help define how characters maintain memory and personality; and ensure everything runs in real time with minimal latency.

What You’ll Do

• Build and optimize real-time voice models and pipelines for natural, low-latency speech
• Develop personality systems, context management, and narrative consistency tools
• Experiment with prompting, fine-tuning, and custom model integration
• Explore generative techniques (e.g. diffusion, multimodal tools) to launch new product features
• Collaborate with rendering engineers to tightly connect voice, visuals, and behavior
• Create metrics and frameworks for evaluating reliability, latency, and engagement
• Prototype and ship AI features directly into the product with fast iteration cycles

You Might Be a Fit If You

Why Join Us

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