AI Software Engineer, Founding Team

Founding Software Engineer · Backend / Fullstack · San Francisco (Hybrid)

Level: Senior

The company

Dex, Language Learning Camera 

https://www.dex.camera/

A stealth-stage startup in San Francisco building AI software and hardware for child education. Our mission is to raise healthier, smarter humans by unlocking every kid's curiosity about the world through AI-enriched products.

The team has backgrounds at Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber; people who've built products from zero to millions of users. We're small on purpose.

Well-funded with a successfully launched product. Now we’re shipping features and scaling. 

The Role

You will build and own the product from zero to scale. This role requires someone who has operated in both early-stage and scaled environments and knows when to move fast vs. when to build for durability. You will ship quickly, make high-quality decisions with incomplete information, and set the technical foundation for the company.

As one of the first engineers, you will report directly to the co-founder and CTO. 

What you'll do

• Design and implement new product features, such as interactive AI-driven real-world game plays, image generation, real time voice-interactions, recommendations, prompt engineering.
• Turn ideas into working prototypes quickly to test and validate 
• Evaluate, fine tune and integrate with third-party AI services including text to speech, speech recognition, multimodal models. 
• End-to-end product feature development.  
• Set up and optimize audio streaming experience to mobile clients.
• Set up and improve engineering foundations (observability, crash reporting, bug tracking, testing, CI/CD, data infrastructure, security, IoT device management).

What we're looking for

• Experience building in both early-stage (0→1) and scaled environments with a solid understanding of tradeoffs between speed and structure
• Product and design sensibility: you care how things look, feel, and perform, and ideally, you've spent time in Product Engineering
• Demonstrated experience building AI applications, such as: RAG, vector store, fine-tuning that serves millions of users.
• Strong engineering foundations across the end-to-end lifecycle of backend development - database, networking, SOA-microservices, streaming, observability, testing, security & privacy best practices.

Hard Skills

• Expertise in Python development, PostgreSQL, Redis, Rest APIs.
• Expertise in async programming, concurrency, performance and latency optimizations.
• Familiarity with Kotlin-multi-platform and Android development is a plus.
• Familiarity with audio/video streaming is a plus.

You may be a good fit if

• Entrepreneurial: You think like an owner and take responsibility for outcomes, not just code
• Customer-Obsessed: You build for real users and care deeply about the experience end-to-end
• Product & Design-Minded: You have strong taste and push for simple, intuitive solutions
• Builder: You’re comfortable creating from nothing and evolving systems as the company scales
• High Standards: You move fast, but you don’t ship garbage—you know where quality matters

Compensation

• $230k - $265k in base, generous equity grant (company leans equity-heavy)
• Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision
• Commuter benefits, wellness / gym, in-office lunch
• Offer package will be determined based on experience and interview performance