Founding Member of Technical Staff — Design Engineering

TensorZero; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

TensorZero is seeking a Founding Member of Technical Staff specializing in design engineering. This role focuses on open-source contributions within a small technical team, aiming to excel in various engineering challenges. Candidates will engage in innovative UI development and have significant influence over the project's direction while enjoying competitive compensation and growth opportunities.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Open-source contributions

Learning and growth opportunities

Small, technical, in-person team

Best-in-class investors

Qualifications

• Strong design background tackling hard design problems.
• Not afraid to code and create prototypes.
• Enthusiastic about personal growth and open-source.

Responsibilities

• Drive large design projects from inception to deployment.
• Work closely with a small technical team on open-source projects.
• Help shape the vision and culture of the project.

Skills

Design engineering

Prototyping

Open-source contribution

UI development

Education

Bachelor's degree in Design or related field

Experience in software engineering

Job description

Founding Member of Technical Staff — Design Engineering

Join to apply for the Founding Member of Technical Staff — Design Engineering role at TensorZero

Founding Member of Technical Staff — Design Engineering

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Join to apply for the Founding Member of Technical Staff — Design Engineering role at TensorZero

This range is provided by TensorZero. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$200,000.00/yr - $300,000.00/yr

TensorZero is an open-source stack for industrial-grade LLM applications. It unifies an LLM gateway, observability, optimization, evaluations, and experimentation.

See our GitHub repository to learn more.

Our ultimate goal is to enable LLM applications to learn from real-world experience. The current offering is the first step towards that vision: it enables a feedback loop for optimizing LLM applications, turning production data into smarter, faster, and cheaper models.

There are engineering teams building with TensorZero in all sorts of industries: healthcare, finance, recruiting, developer tools, consumer, etc.

Here's a case study: Automating Code Changelogs at a Large Bank with LLMs

Our technical team includes a former Rust compiler maintainer, machine learning researchers (Stanford, CMU, Oxford, Columbia) with thousands of citations, and the chief product officer of a decacorn startup.

We’re backed by the same investors as leading open-source projects (e.g. ClickHouse, CockroachDB) and AI labs (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic). We’re lucky to have years of runway, giving us the flexibility to fully focus on open source for now with an ambitious long-term vision.

Role

We are looking for a Founding Member of Technical Staff with a background in design engineering. The vast majority of your work will be open source. You’ll have an opportunity to continue to master your current skills with the flexibility to learn new ones from scratch.

You can learn more about our technical roadmap and vision here. As a preview, if you joined today, you'd take on our open-source UI that helps engineers manage the entire TensorZero operation — think of it like the AWS Console for TensorZero. The UI streamlines workflows for observability, optimization (e.g. fine-tuning), evaluations, and more.

Team & Culture

We’re a small technical team based in NYC (in person). As an early contributor, you’ll work closely with us and have a significant impact on the project’s future and vision.

• Viraj Mehta (Co-Founder & CTO) is an ML researcher with deep expertise in reinforcement learning, generative modeling, and LLMs. He received a PhD from CMU with an emphasis on data-efficient RL for nuclear fusion and LLMs, and previously worked in machine learning at KKR and a fintech startup. He holds a BS in math and an MS in computer science from Stanford.
• Gabriel Bianconi (Co-Founder & CEO) was the chief product officer at Ondo Finance ($20B+ valuation) and previously spent years consulting on machine learning for companies ranging from early-stage tech startups to some of the largest financial firms. He holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from Stanford.
• Aaron Hill (MTS) is a back-end engineer with deep expertise in Rust. He became one of the maintainers of the Rust compiler… while still in college. Later, he worked on back-end infrastructure at AWS and Svix. He’s also an active contributor to many notable open-source Rust projects (e.g. Ruffle).
• Andrew Jesson (MTS) is an ML researcher with deep expertise in Bayesian ML, causal inference, RL, and LLMs. He recently completed a postdoc at Columbia and previously received a PhD from Oxford, during which he interned at Meta. He has 3.3k+ citations and several first-author papers at NeurIPS and other top ML venues.
• Kincaid O’Neil (MTS) is a full-stack engineer who previously founded Gathers, a consumer social startup that curated intimate in-person experiences. Before that, he built open-source payments infrastructure for the Interledger Protocol and worked at Coil, Ripple, and Kava.
• █████ (incoming MTS) is an ML researcher with a background in causal inference, sequential decision making, uncertainty quantification, and algorithmic fairness (1.2k+ citations). Previously, he was an AI Research Lead at █████ and received a PhD in Statistics from CMU, during which he interned at █████ and █████.
• _____ You?
  
  

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation — We believe that great talent deserves great compensation (salary, equity, benefits), even at an early-stage startup.
• Open-source contributions — The vast majority of your work will be open-source and public.
• Learning and growth opportunities — You’ll join with a background in design engineering but will have the opportunity (& be encouraged) to expand your skill set way beyond that (curious about ML?).
• Small, technical, in-person team — You’ll work alongside a 100% technical team and help shape our vision, culture, and engineering practices.
• Best-in-class investors — We’re lucky to be backed by leading funds like FirstMark (backed ClickHouse), Bessemer (backed Anthropic), Bedrock (backed OpenAI), and many angels. We have years of runway and a long-term mindset.
  
  

We’re Looking For

• Strong design background — You’ve tackled hard design problems. You’re comfortable driving large projects from inception to deployment, from Figma to React.
• Not afraid to code — You're excited to design in Figma, create prototypes, and ship PRs touching the UI.
• Passionate about your craft & design — You're excited about the idea of re-thinking developer tooling from first principles to build interfaces and workflows that don't just work but also delight.
• Hungry for personal growth — There are no speed limits at TensorZero. You’re excited about learning and contributing across the stack.
• In-person in NYC — We work in-person five days a week in NYC. We work hard and obsess about the craft – but maintain and encourage a healthy lifestyle with a long-term mindset.
  
  

You can find us on Github: https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero

Compensation Range: $200K - $300K

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Engineering and Information Technology

• Industries

  Technology, Information and Internet

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