Founding Member of Technical Staff

Locke (YC S26); Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

PTO

Job summary

Locke (YC S26) is hiring Members of Technical Staff to build AI agents at the core of our platform. You will work closely with founders, government officials, and users, owning projects from prototype to production.

You will ship end-to-end AI tools, develop retrieval pipelines, and design evaluation frameworks to ensure reliable, high-quality outputs for policy staff and clients. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role in a fast-moving, mission-driven company.

Qualifications

• Solid engineering experience with full-stack product work and applied AI/ML.
• Experience shipping real LLM-powered products and agents.
• Comfort with modern AI stack: agent workflows, retrieval, and evals.

Responsibilities

• Build and own AI agents end-to-end from prototype to production.
• Ship tools for policy staff to use, increasing speed and sharpness.
• Develop retrieval/data pipelines feeding agents with legislative/regulatory information.
• Design eval frameworks to measure and improve output quality.
• Collaborate closely with non-technical teams to ensure usable tools.
• Contribute to building the technical playbook as the company grows.

Skills

Full-stack development

Applied AI/ML

LLM-powered products

Agent workflows

Retrieval pipelines

Eval frameworks

Team collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

About The Role

We're hiring

About The Role

We're hiring Members of Technical Staff - engineers who build the AI agents at the heart of everything we do. You'll sit close to founders, government officials, and to the people who depend on your work every day, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

What we're building

Government Runs On An Enormous, Constantly-changing Pile Of Unstructured Data - Bills, Rules, Dockets, Agency Filings, And Comment Periods Spread Across Congress, Federal Agencies, And 50 States. We're Building Agents That Understand All Of It And Turns It Into Action For Our Clients. Specifically, That Means

• Agents that ingest legislation and regulations, reason over them, and produce real work product - memos, alerts, strategy, and proposals - reliably enough that our team stakes client relationships on it
• Retrieval and data pipelines that keep those agents fed with accurate, up-to-date information from messy, inconsistent government sources
• Eval frameworks that measure whether an agent's output is actually correct and useful
• The product surfaces our team works in all day - drafting tools, monitoring dashboards, and alerting
• Over time, the shared intelligence layer that sits underneath the entire company

What You'll Do

• Build and own the AI agents our team relies on = end to end, from prototype to production
• Treat our policy staff as your users: ship the tools they depend on, and make them faster and sharper
• Build the retrieval and data pipelines that feed our agents accurate legislative and regulatory information
• Design eval frameworks to measure and steadily improve the quality of what our agents produce
• Work closely with our non-technical team - tight collaboration between our technical and non-technical people is how the agents get good
• Help build the technical playbook as we grow!

What We're Looking For

• Solid engineering experience: full-stack product work, applied AI/ML, or a closely related field
• You've built and shipped real LLM-powered products and agents
• You're comfortable with the modern AI stack - building agent workflows, wiring up retrieval, and writing evals to keep quality honest
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity - you figure things out and drive them to completion
• Tokenmaxxer: if you are not a power user of Claude Code / Codex / Cursor, this is not for you.
• Bonus: genuine curiosity about government, policy, or regulated industries. You don't need a Hill background, but you should be excited to learn the domain

Logistics

• In-person 5–6 days a week in SF, with occasional travel
• Meaningful founding-level equity, plus competitive salary, benefits, and PTO. Compensation will grow rapidly with performance
• Fun: we like traveling, grabbing food, and frolicking around SF / DC together
• You must currently be based in the United States. If you are not, do not apply.