AI Prototyper Residency

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote - North America

Employment Type: Contract

Hi, we're The Browser Company 👋 and we're building a better way to use the internet.

Browsers are unique in that they are one of the only pieces of software that you share with your parents as well as your kids. Which makes sense, they're our doorway to the most important things — through them we socialize with loved ones, work on our passion projects, and explore our curiosities. But on their own, they don’t actually do a whole lot, they’re kind of just there. They don’t help us organize our messy lives or make it easier to compose our ideas. We believe that the browser could do so much more — it can empower and support the amazing things we do on the internet. That’s why we’re building one: a browser that can help us grow, create, and stay curious.

To accomplish this lofty task, we’re building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds and experiences. This isn’t optional, it’s crucial to our mission, as we need a wide range of perspectives to challenge our assumptions and shape our browser through a bold, creative lens. With that in mind, we especially encourage women, people of color, and others from historically marginalized groups to apply.

About the role

We're looking for an AI Prototyper to explore how frontier AI capabilities can shape the future of Dia. This is a builder's role focused on turning ambiguous product bets into working software that informs what to build and how to build it. Prototyping in this role takes many forms: some prototypes are interactive demos inside Dia; others are experiments across eval harnesses, context-engineering or, agent architecture. You’ll turn ambiguous ideas and big bets into proven prototypes that are ready to handoff to our product teams.

You'll report to our Model Behavior Lead and work closely with product and engineering leadership. You'll start with directed explorations: given a product bet, you'll evaluate the promising approaches, build working examples, and return with a recommendation and the tradeoffs behind it. Over time, we expect you to identify and propose these explorations yourself.

Overall you will…

• De-risk new directions. Take an ambiguous bet, evaluate the technical paths available, build working examples, and clearly demonstrate the tradeoffs between approaches.

• Prototype at the frontier. Work hands-on with the newest models, agent SDKs, and tooling patterns as they ship, and translate them into working software inside Dia.

• Build to hand off. Deliver prototypes with deliberate, explainable architecture decisions, so production teams can extend your work rather than rebuild it.

• Work in the open. Share your learnings, approaches, and demos as you go, so your explorations shape the team's thinking and product decisions.

• Sharpen our tooling. Improve our prototyping and evaluation infrastructure so the team can explore and validate ideas faster.

Recent examples of projects the Model Behavior team led:

• Morning Brief. Prototyped our best performing feature of all time. The Morning Brief started as an idea from our Head of Engineering and was handed to Model Behavior to shape and bring to life. It required forming an opinion around what a morning brief should include, how to present it, and finally how to ensure quality was acceptable.

• Chat architecture. Our move to an agent harness began as a prototype over our winter shutdown. It now powers Dia's chat, and it's the latest in a line of upgrades the team has led since GPT-3.5.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional experience building software. You come from an engineering background or a product/design background with strong technical understanding. Previous experience as a founder is a plus.

• You build with AI constantly. You've made real things with frontier models: agents, tools, prototypes, or shipped features. Whether that happened at work or on nights and weekends doesn't matter. What matters is that you can show us what you built and walk us through how it works.

• A relentless learner with strong EQ and communication. You can articulate the “why” behind your experiments clearly and are pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.

• Most of our team is based in North American time zones and require that folks have 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

• You resonate with our company values and can continue to scale your team with these in mind

Compensation

This is a 3-month Residency contract-to-hire position. Hourly pay range is $100-$150 per hour, based on experience and qualifications. Some of our best hires come through our Residency Program. You will be fully embedded on the team to hone your craft, ship something you're proud of, and explore a full-time opportunity. Once converted to FTE, we offer a competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.

The Browser Company is an ambitious team of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, New York. We strongly support diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. 

🚙 To read more about what we value as a company, check out Notes on Roadtrips on our blog.