Founding Engineering Lead — Voice AI & Local Inference

Jack & Jill

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 160,000 - 200,000

Full time

4 days ago

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Job summary

OpenWhispr is seeking a founding engineering lead in San Francisco or Chicago to own architecture for a product with 150,000+ downloads, leading 3-4 engineers while shipping core code. You will solve complex problems across local speech-to-text, latency reduction, and AI agent integrations, ensuring the highest standards for a vocal-first future.

Reporting to the founder, you will tackle latency and privacy concerns, set engineering standards, and drive the technical roadmap for the company’s

Qualifications

Has roughly five years of engineering experience with a track record of leading small teams to ship polished consumer-facing software.
Demonstrates deep product craft and design taste, with a bias toward simplifying complex systems rather than adding unnecessary features.
Proven ability to manage parallel AI-assisted workstreams effectively while maintaining rigorous quality and avoiding AI slop.

Responsibilities

Act as a player-coach, spending the majority of your time writing high-impact code while leading and unblocking a team of 3-4 engineers.
Architect and maintain complex voice pipelines, optimizing for latency and accuracy across diverse hardware and software environments.
Define engineering standards for the company, including code review processes, testing frameworks, and high-leverage AI-assisted workstreams.