AI Engineer

Role Overview:

We're seeking a Senior/Staff AI Engineer(s) to join our fast-paced team to design, develop, and implement new features for Littlebird, our personalized AI teammate for Mac and Android (Windows soon!). We're building personal AI; a thought partner that connects dots in your work and helps you think.

We're an async-first team that values craft and ownership. Our engineers live at the intersection of genuine research curiosity and production discipline: you'll push the frontier in areas like conversational inference, memory, and sentiment analysis, then wrestle those ideas into systems that are fast, lean, and built to scale.

The Role:

You will architect the system that allows our agent to reason, remember, and evolve. You'll develop core infrastructure that turns messy, unstructured user data into a coherent world model.

Some of the hard problems you'll solve:

• Build a Real AI Memory (Beyond Vectors): Our current vector-based memory is hitting its limits. You'll lead the charge to design and implement our next-generation memory system. This means solving hard problems in:
  • Entity & Relationship Extraction: How do you reliably extract "my sister Anna" and the "Q4 roadmap" as distinct entities and link them from unstructured text, at scale?
  • Temporal Awareness: How do you model facts that change over time? A user's project status, their job title, their relationship to a contact are not static. You'll build the systems to manage this temporal complexity.
  • Graph-based Retrieval: How do you query a graph efficiently to provide the agent with rich, structured context, moving beyond simple semantic search?
• Architect a Scalable, Debuggable Agentic System: Our agent is a multi-step, tool-using system.
  • You'll design clean interfaces between the agent's "brain" (the planner) and its "hands" (the tools/modalities).
  • You'll build the debugging and observability tools necessary to understand why an agentic flow failed, which is one of the hardest challenges in this space.
• Scale Our Data & Retrieval Pipelines: As we grow, you'll be responsible for ensuring our data ingestion, hybrid search (BM25 + vector), and re-ranking pipelines are fast, reliable, and cost-effective.

Required Skills:

• Deep experience building and scaling data-intensive backend systems in Python.
• A strong mental model for data structures and their trade-offs. You like to think deeply about how to represent complex information.
• Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, but you're probably a little frustrated with their limitations.
• A pragmatic approach. You know when to build for the long term and when to ship a clever solution that works now.

Benefits:

• Remote-friendly work environment
• Collaborative team culture
• Opportunity to shape infrastructure decisions
• Competitive compensation packages including stock and health benefits, paid time off, and parental leave
• Flexible working hours across multiple time zones
• We love to hear when birds chirp!