- Either two of these: full-stack/AI/ASR
- Own surface: watch/phone/desktop + ASR
- Superstar generalist, real product taste
- Swift/React, iOS core
Ambi is hiring 2–3 founding product engineers to own the product surface end to end — phone, watch, and desktop, plus the underlying agent and ASR pipeline. You'll work directly with the Head of Product rather than off a fixed backlog, turning a Slack thread or a one-line ask into shipped product with minimal spec, and making real UX/UI/backend/AI-ML tradeoffs on the fly based on what the feature actually needs. Most critically, Ambi wants engineers with genuine product sense and taste — people who build the features they'd want as a user, and who see someone complaining on Discord or Reddit, dig in, talk to the user, and ship the fix. This is a superstar generalist seat, not a narrow specialist.
Austin frames it as a "constellation" across three competencies — no one needs all three, but ideally two: (1) strong full-stack / all-rounder (the most important; can jump into any part of the stack), (2) AI-systems experience (post-training, a RAG harness — more than wiring a few APIs), and (3) ASR / speech-to-text pipeline experience. iOS is important (biggest surfaces are Apple Watch, iPhone, Mac). Device/hardware experience in constrained systems (thermal, power, latency) is a real plus. The ideal make-up: someone strongly full-stack + AI, someone strong on ASR who thinks product-first, and one who straddles the two — all working across the stack together.
What You'll Own
- Features end to end across phone, watch, and desktop, plus the agent/ASR pipeline beneath them
- Turning a Slack thread / one-line GM ask into shipped product with minimal spec
- Independent UX/UI/backend/AI-ML tradeoffs based on what the feature needs
- Fixes on ASR latency and small-word accuracy, watch tap-target and voiceprint reliability, cross-platform meeting detection, agent responsiveness
- Design → ship → iterate on real user feedback, without waiting to be told the next step
- Partnering with Product and Design to prioritize and execute the roadmap
Requirements
- Genuinely capable across UX, UI, backend, and AI/ML — has shipped consumer features end to end across at least two of: mobile, desktop, wearable, backend
- Strong full-stack all-rounder (the #1 competency); Swift and React weighted (iOS ecosystem is core)
- Real-time / streaming systems aptitude
- Ideally 2 of 3: full-stack+AI, AI systems (post-training / RAG harness, not just APIs), - ASR/speech-to-text pipelines
- Product sense with technical depth — builds what they'd want as a user
Execution and Ownership
- High autonomy and ownership; "what's the job to be done, and I'll go do it"
- A deep collaborator — can sit down, work a problem/tradeoff, and reason about good vs. bad UX
- Ships from first principles; doesn't wait for the next step
Background
- 2+ years; founding-engineer / own-startup / high-traction-project backgrounds preferred
- Cautious on pure big-tech (ambiguity-handling concern); wary of very senior (director/CTO / ~8–10+ yrs) who no longer execute day to day
- School/company pedigree de-emphasized
- Nice-to-have: iOS/watchOS/wearable dev, speech/audio ML, prior AI-native consumer app, agent/LLM feature-building, hardware-adjacent startup
Who Will Thrive Here
- A superstar generalist who wants both the product judgment to decide what to build and the range to build it
- Someone who ships consumer features across surfaces and sweats UX for real users
- A founding-type builder, high-autonomy, allergic to fixed backlogs
- Excited by voice/ASR, wearables, and constrained-device engineering