Member of Technical Staff, Tech Lead

Listen Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation packages

Comprehensive healthcare and dental coverage

Flexible time off

Career growth opportunities

Job summary

A leading AI-powered research company in San Francisco seeks a highly technical engineer to join a fast-growing team. You will be responsible for solving complex problems across the product design, while maintaining a high bar for quality and detailed execution. The role involves working with advanced AI models, communicating effectively within the team, and contributing to the architectural decisions in a startup environment. Competitive compensation and benefits are offered.

Qualifications

• You have a high bar for quality and obsess about details.
• You’re excited to work with LLM capabilities and advanced AI models.
• You're highly technical, coding from a young age.

Responsibilities

• Solve complex problems end-to-end across the LLM pipeline.
• Make critical architectural decisions in a greenfield stack.
• Communicate tradeoffs, problems, and blockers with clarity.

Skills

Problem-solving

Technical communication

Attention to detail

AI model usage

Software architecture design

Job description

TL;DR: We are seeing strong market demand and an aggressive 6-month product roadmap, so we are expanding our engineering team. We're looking for someone highly technical (our current team includes 3 IOI medalists) who wants to build a product that is changing how companies make decisions. If you're excited about tackling complex problems end-to-end, we should talk.

Background

Listen Labs is an AI-powered research platform that helps teams uncover insights from customer interviews in hours — not months. We help customers analyze conversations, surface themes, and make faster, smarter product decisions.

Company highlights — entirely product-led:

• World-Class Team: Founded by serial entrepreneurs (previous AI exit), former co-founders, and talent from Jane Street, Twitter, Stripe, Aff
• Hypergrowth: We’re a 40-person team backed by Sequoia, growing from $0 to a $14M run‑rate in under a year. We move fast, care deeply about craft, and love working with people who take ownership.
• Traction: Rapid growth across segments with enterprise wins at Google, Microsoft, Nestlé, and P&G.
• Performance: Industry‑leading win rate driven by a highly differentiated product.
• Market Validation: Consistently winning customers across all segments with over six‑figure lands that lead to quick expansions.
• Viral Product: Interviews are shared with tens of thousands of viewers, fueling PLG, organic expansion, and daily inbound from Fortune 500s.

Technical Challenges

1. McKinsey On Demand: Building a research agent
   Hiring McKinsey is different than buying software. You don't just get tools, but get opinions, experience, and execution. We build Listen with that perspective: You have an AI agent on your side that knows everything about our platform and the best research practices. It helps you set up your project, conduct interviews with your goals in mind, and analyze thousands of responses.

2. Database of Humanity
   One of the key value props is our ability to find the people you are looking for (eg, "power users of ChatGPT and Excel"). We are building a database of millions of humans. The more studies you do with Listen, the better we understand you. This enables finding people with unmatched accuracy and, in the long run, extrapolating what a person would say based on all previous conversations — imagine answering questions for your best friend.

3. Realtime Video Interviews
   The next version of our AI interviewer will have emotional understanding of video and voice to read between the lines. The goal is to make our interviewers more nuanced and effective than the most senior user researchers. This involves computer vision, speech analysis, and real‑time decision making.

4. Distributed Information Mining
   The most interesting information is not publicly accessible on the web; it lives only in people's minds. We are building an agent that, given a question, finds the right people to talk to, asks the right questions, and returns a report and actionable recommendations. That's what consultants charge millions for. The ceiling is incredibly high, and we are pushing the technical boundaries to help companies, from investment firms to tech companies, make the best decisions.

5. Customer Preference Model & Synthetic Personas
   We're bringing Jeff Bezos' vision of the customer being part of every life decision. We're building the most profound understanding of customers, which will allow us to extrapolate to new questions via synthetic personas. This involves complex modeling of human behavior, preferences, and decision‑making processes.

What We Look For

• You want to solve problems end-to-end: Our team is split vertically, so every engineer owns a part of the product and needs to make decisions across the LLM pipeline, infrastructure, backend, and UX (with help!).
• You have a high bar for quality: In a startup, moving fast is essential. But even more important is to care about your output, obsess about details, and build a product that works, especially in the time of AI. Slop compounds!
• You’re an architect: You’re excited to walk into a greenfield stack and make critical decisions that will define our architecture for years to come.
• You want to push LLM capabilities: We continually push the most advanced AI models to their limits and work with the foundational companies on their new releases.
• You are a clear thinker and communicator: We only have one meeting a week and expect you to communicate tradeoffs, problems, and blockers directly.
• You are highly technical: Most of our team has started coding as young teenagers and nerd out on details from language design to compilers.

Life at Listen Labs

• Competitive Compensation: We’re backed by world‑class investors, including Sequoia Capital, Conviction, AI Grant, and Pear VC, and offer competitive compensation packages with meaningful equity ownership.
  • Over $30B in market cap has been created in adjacent industries (Medallia, AlphaSense, GLG, Ipsos, Kantar). Our Sequoia partner, Bryan Schreier, was the first investor in Qualtrics—a $12B company tackling similar problems to ours.
• Benefits that Support You: Comprehensive healthcare and dental coverage, flexible time off to recharge, and an environment that values balance and trust.
• Room to Grow: As an early member of the team, you’ll have the opportunity to take on new responsibilities, shape processes from scratch, and grow alongside the company. We value people who want to stretch beyond their role and build something lasting.