- Founding engineer (#4)
- Spike + product sense + founder-DNA
- 3–5 yrs; exceptional juniors OK
- System modeling; customer-facing day one
Antes is hiring its 4th engineer to join a tight three-person eng team (the CTO plus two founding engineers). This is a founding, high-ownership seat with two areas of need — and the person should ideally satisfy both, with priority set by their strengths. First, helping scale and run a large active pilot (~100 users, growing) with a major engineering manufacturer well. Second — and the priority — a new product direction toward the core vision: system modeling, i.e., building models of how a complex system's hardware, software, mechanical, electrical, fluidic, and thermal subsystems connect (think an engine), from design, requirements, and engineering data. It's deep engineering work the model is capable of but that takes real engineering to make work — not "throw it at ChatGPT." There's some infra work too (some deployed on-prem for defense customers), but they explicitly don't want an infra-heavy person: product takes priority, and the hire must be flexible and genuinely interested in working with customers to figure out what to build.
Rongfei's hiring rubric is explicit — talent, judgment, character — and he's looking for a spike: engineer #4 must raise the bar somewhere, not just be a solid generalist. All current engineers are ex-founders (loosely intentional): they're in sales calls and with customers from day one, and Antes actively supports their ambition to found. The role can lean toward customer-facing pilot work or, for someone with strong prior context, toward system-modeling with the CTO (eventually including training custom models for customers).
What You'll Own
- The new product direction — system modeling of complex multi-physics engineering systems (hardware/software/mechanical/electrical/fluidic/thermal), from design and requirements data
- Helping run and scale the large active pilot (~100 users) so it succeeds
- Some infra (kept deliberately lean; some on-prem for defense customers)
- Direct customer work from day one — including flying to customers (e.g., Sweden) to shape the product
- Eventually, training custom models for customers
Requirements
Talent (raw horsepower)
- Elite raw intellectual horsepower — high slope over years of experience (they've hired a 6-months-into-coding freshman and Stripe senior staff)
- Strong enough to clear a real technical bar
- A spike: exceptional in some dimension (deep hardware, infra, product/strategy) — not a flat "solid engineer"
Judgment (the selling point)
- Engineering intuition + product sense — can translate customer input into what's actually valuable and buildable
- Business-style engineering judgment — makes founder-level architecture/trade-off calls (ship-fast-but-debt vs. slower-but-right)
- Product-first: they explicitly don't want great-at-infra-but-weak-at-product (that's engineer #10–20, not #4)
Character (culture fit)
- Genuinely cares about the mission — "making cars go faster and planes go safer"; interest in physical AI is a must, regardless of talent
- Founder DNA / ambition to be more than "just an engineer"
- High trust, low ego, collaborative; intense when it counts but not 996, no babysitting
- Won't jump ship when things get choppy — commitment through the zero-to-one stage
Background signals
- ~3–5 years / senior-ish is typical (current hires ~age 30), but open to exceptional juniors
- Ex-founder or real startup experience helps; all-big-tech (Google/Meta only) often signals low risk tolerance
- Hardware background helps but isn't required — even a college robotics club counts; interest in physical AI matters more
- Non-obvious signals prized: strong engineering schools (Purdue, Georgia Tech, UIUC) with a great record; olympiad/ICPC in non-obvious geographies; research done where it isn't the easy résumé move; complex real work under an unimpressive-looking title (e.g., hard mathematical optimization at an airline; CAD/3D modeling)
Who Will Thrive Here
- A spike engineer with founder ambition who wants to be #4 and shape a category ("Cursor for hardware")
- Product-minded and customer-facing — happy in a customer call and a deep system-modeling problem in the same week
- Mission-driven about physical engineering — cars, planes, complex hardware — not chasing prestige
- High-trust, low-ego, intense-when-it-counts, committed through the messy early stage
- Excited by frontier AI applied to real, high-stakes physical systems