Founding Engineer

empathic

On-site

San Francisco, CA

Full-time

Senior

Staff

3+ yrs

Salary not listedPosted 2mo ago

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Real job — pulled straight from empathic’s careers page · Verified June 5, 2026 · No reposts.

empathic is hiring a Founding Engineer — a full-time, based in San Francisco, CA role. Apply directly on empathic's careers page below.

Founding Engineer

Location: San Francisco

Department: Engineering

Location Type: IN_OFFICE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

tl;dr: This is a 1 of 1 role. We're looking for a founding engineer to work alongside a Thiel Fellow founder as employee #1 - with 5X more equity than most "founding engineers"

About Empathic

“…but I tell you all today, I would rather die a man than live for all eternity a machine.”

-Bicentennial Man (Asimov, 1976)

The world is trending towards fewer, shallower friendships, meaning more lonely people and less social contact than ever before. Empathic is creating a great friend for everyone on Earth, by digitizing connection, in what we think could be the biggest cultural transition of our lifetime.

Most AI “conversation” today is a robotic, sterile, turn-based interface. We’re building towards a realistic real-time video call medium where AI can be present and proactive, to connect with users. Users will connect not on a new destination, but the iMessage, Facetime, and other native apps they already love.

We've raised $2.7M led by BoxGroup and the founder is a Thiel Fellow, YC alum, Stanford dropout who recently sold his last company. We intend to build a engineering-first organization of the highest quality, fully in-person in San Francisco. Think a room full of only the smartest people you've met, doing the best work of your life.

Who you are

3+ years experience, excluding internships, with 1+ year senior responsibilities
You use AI gen to move faster in all aspects of development, but you developed deep technical taste before, with strong opinions on systems, code quality, and the craft of software development.
Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Typescript or similar) and distributed systems concepts, work with databases, etc. You've built apps full stack.
Frontend proficiency and design taste is a massive plus.
You are excited about working at the earliest stage! Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who has built a product from scratch is a plus
Proven ability to thrive in fast-growing, product-driven companies by effectively navigating loosely defined tasks and managing competing priorities.

What you’ll do

Shape the next generation of human-AI interaction with our founder, design, and other engineers.
Build new systems for memory, retrieval, proactivity, responsiveness, and more
Work on and integrate the latest internal and external real-time video generation and audio synthesis models
Build user facing interfaces and features
Create the bar for engineering quality and help recruit world-class talent.
Report directly to the founder: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike21/

Interview process

Our interview process is simple, and we can go start to finish in less than one week at fastest:

20-minute screening call
2 technical interviews
Onsite
Offer

We always perform reference checks.

Benefits

Extremely generous equity ownership
Generous medical/dental/vision, covering most Gold and Platinum plans (via employer ICHRA)
Free lunch and dinner every day
Monthly bonus if you live or move close to the office
401k plus match
Obvious things (work computer, things you need to get things done)