Member of Technical Staff, Founding Engineer

a16z-speedrun; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Primitive Labs is hiring a founding engineer to own areas from design through production, shaping infrastructure, agent architectures, and developer tooling. You will help ship agents that model human behavior and operate across real experiences.

As a small team, we value ownership, fast iteration, and deep curiosity. You will work across full stack, SDLC, and collaborate with design partners and customers to deliver impactful releases.

Qualifications

• Shipped full-stack products to production.
• Operate with high autonomy: identify what needs to exist and build it.
• An agent-native developer who both uses and designs the tools.
• Effective at driving AI through the SDLC.

Responsibilities

• Own design and delivery across the full stack.
• Work with our design partners and customers to turn their feedback into new releases.
• Contribute to the systems and SDLC that shape how we develop and operate as we scale.
• Build new agent architectures, drawing on computational cognitive science.

Skills

Full-stack

Autonomy

Agent architectures

AI SDLC

Job description

At Primitive Labs our mission is to make human behavior a first-class primitive of software development.

As a founding engineer, you own areas of the system from design through production. Your work will span infrastructure, agent architectures, evaluation systems, developer tooling, and the product around them. The goal is to ship agents that reliably model human behavior and act across real experiences. At Primitive Labs everyone is a builder: the whole team pushes code and contributes to research.

Responsibilities

• Own design and delivery across the full stack.

• Work with our design partners and customers to turn their feedback into new releases.

• Contribute to the systems and SDLC that shape how we develop and operate as we scale.

• Build new agent architectures, drawing on computational cognitive science.

Qualifications

• Shipped full-stack products to production.

• Operate with high autonomy: identify what needs to exist and build it.

• An agent-native developer who both uses and designs the tools.

• Effective at driving AI through the SDLC.

Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus paid time off and vacation.

We hire for potential, and we base compensation on what we believe you can achieve rather than years of experience or a list of skills.

About Primitive Labs

Primitive Labs is building AI systems that are human-aligned. As machines make more of the decisions that shape our lives, we are working to keep people at the center of them. Our founding team comes from Amazon Artificial General Intelligence and AWS. We are backed by top-tier venture firms and investors, and our advisors are researchers and operators with backgrounds from OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and many other leading organizations. Check out our launch blog to learn more.

Everyone at Primitive Labs is a builder. Our whole team pushes code and contributes to research. The best work, in our experience, comes from a few people trusted with real ownership and left to do it well, with no layers in between. We move quickly and speak honestly. We hold that every belief can be challenged, especially our own. We want people who are deeply passionate about their work and have a virtually unlimited intellectual curiosity. If you believe in building AI systems that are human-aligned and genuinely love solving hard problems, we would love to talk.

Primitive Labs AI Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.