Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineering

About the role

Listen Labs builds AI systems that bridge the gap between human preferences and product development. We are a Sequoia-backed company that automates qualitative research by running large-scale, AI-moderated video interviews to help organizations understand what to build next.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own product features end-to-end, spanning the full stack from LLM pipelines and infrastructure to backend services and user interfaces.
• Develop and refine our preference models to improve the accuracy of human behavior simulations.
• Build and maintain the Human API to integrate our research data directly into IDEs, Slack, Linear, and autonomous coding agents.
• Improve our AI interviewer capabilities by analyzing tone, facial expressions, and speech patterns to capture nuanced feedback.
• Evaluate and optimize AI-driven research agents that automate complex study design and reporting tasks.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and project decisions through written documentation.

Requirements

• Ability to operate independently with minimal oversight in a small, founder-led team environment.
• Deep technical background with a history of solving complex engineering problems from conception to deployment.
• Experience working with frontier LLMs and a desire to push the boundaries of current model capabilities.
• Strong written communication skills to facilitate decision-making in a low-meeting culture.
• A focus on high-quality, 100% solutions and a commitment to identifying root causes when issues arise.

Nice to have

• Experience as a founder or a background in building products from the ground up.
• Competitive programming or deep technical hobbyist experience.
• Experience with high-scale data systems or complex model evaluation frameworks.

Skills & tools

• LLM pipelines
• Backend infrastructure
• UX development
• Preference modeling
• Human-computer interaction

Practical notes

• Compensation: $180,000 to $300,000 base salary plus meaningful equity.
• Benefits: Comprehensive healthcare and dental insurance, flexible time off, and a high-trust work environment.
• Investors: Sequoia Capital, Conviction, Ribbit, AI Grant, Pear VC, and Evantic.
• Customers: Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Google, Microsoft, Robinhood, Nestlé, P&G, and Sweetgreen.