Founding Product Engineer

San Francisco Tensor Company; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 225,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

San Francisco Tensor Company in California is seeking a Founding Product Engineer to lead the development of their training platform. The ideal candidate will have strong frontend skills in React/Next.js and backend experience with APIs and databases.

This role emphasizes product ownership, requiring candidates to manage design and build processes for user interfaces, as well as infrastructure using AWS. The estimated salary ranges from $225,000 to $275,000, with additional bonuses and equity options.

Qualifications

• Experience in shipping fully completed products is essential.
• Familiarity with React/Next.js and modern web APIs.
• Comfortable building APIs and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Own product areas: scoping, designing, building, and iterating.
• Develop clean and polished web interfaces.
• Manage infrastructure deployments on AWS using Kubernetes.

Skills

Proven experience shipping complete products

Frontend skills (React/Next.js, CSS)

Sharp eye for design and motion

Solid backend skills

AWS and Kubernetes familiarity

Ability to work independently

Real taste in software usability

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Figma

Job description

About SF Tensor

At The San Francisco Tensor Company, we believe the future of AI and high-performance computing depends on rethinking the entire software and infrastructure stack. Today's developers face bottlenecks across hardware, cloud, and code optimization that slow progress before ideas can reach their full potential. Our mission is to remove those barriers and make compute faster, cheaper, and universally portable.

We are building a Kernel Optimizer that automatically transforms code into its most efficient form, combined with Tensor Cloud for adaptive, cross-cloud compute and Emma Lang, a new programming language for high-performance, hardware-aware computation. Together, these technologies reinvent the foundations of AI and HPC.

SF Tensor is proudly backed by Susa Ventures and Y Combinator, as well as a group of angels including Max Mullen and Paul Graham as well as founders and executives of NeuraLink, Notion and AMD. We are partnering with researchers, engineers, and organizations who share our belief that the next breakthroughs in AI require breakthroughs in compute.

About the Role

We're searching for a Founding Product Engineer who'll own the entire user-facing surface of our training platform: everything from the daily interfaces our users interact with to the systems that make it all run.

This role requires taking vague features and shipping them from start to finish. We care just as much about how the product feels to use as whether it technically works. If you're someone who gets genuinely annoyed by janky animations, sloppy spacing, or interactions that feel off, we'd love to talk.

What You'll Do

• Take full ownership of product areas: scoping, designing, building, and iterating on them
• Build clean, fast, polished web interfaces with Next.js that feel almost native
• Write simple, performant backend services in Bun/TypeScript
• Deploy and manage infrastructure on AWS (EKS, S3, and the usual suspects) using Kubernetes
• Obsess over the small things, from loading states, smooth animations, solid error handling to edge cases, the things that turn a good product into a great one
• Make smart product tradeoffs with little hand-holding: know when to ship fast and when to spend extra time polishing
• Help shape our product culture and engineering standards as one of the first engineers on the team

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience shipping complete products, not just individual features (ideally something you can show us)
• Serious frontend skills: you're very comfortable with React/Next.js, CSS, and modern web APIs
• A sharp eye for design and motion: you notice when an animation eases awkwardly, when padding feels inconsistent, or when something just looks cheap
• Solid backend chops: you can build APIs, work with databases, and troubleshoot production issues
• Enough infrastructure comfort to handle AWS, containers, and Kubernetes (you don't need to be a DevOps wizard, but you're not scared of a Dockerfile either)
• Ability to move independently in ambiguous situations
• Real taste. You have strong opinions (and reasons) about what makes software feel good to use

Nice to Have

• Experience with Bun, or eagerness to dive in
• Background in developer tools, infrastructure products, or building for technical users
• Familiarity with Cloudflare (Workers, R2, etc.)
• Time spent at early-stage startups or as an early employee
• Open-source contributions or a public portfolio you're proud of
• Comfort using design tools like Figma to mock things up yourself when needed

Why Join Us

You'd be one of the first product engineers building tools that will change how people train AI models at scale. If you want to work on something that actually matters and have the freedom to build it the right way, this is the spot.

We believe in the power of in-person collaboration to solve the hardest problems and foster a strong team culture. We offer relocation assistance and look forward to you joining us in our San Francisco office.

The base salary range for this full-time position is $225,000 - $275,000 + bonus + equity + benefits.