Founding Engineer

Cruitical is hiring on behalf of an AI hardware and software startup building interfaces that move at the speed of thought. Their device listens across conversations, meetings and the signals of everyday life, then acts on them. Because calendar and email are connected, it drafts the follow-up and completes the task instead of only reminding you it exists. Seed-funded and only months old, they already have a global team dozens strong and a founding team that has built and shipped a category-leading device in this exact space. Closed beta is live and going well. Public launch is being prepared. This is one of the first hires on their San Francisco team.

The Role:

You own the product surface end to end across phone, watch and desktop, plus the agent and ASR pipeline underneath it. You work directly with the Head of Product rather than off a fixed backlog, which means the UX, UI, backend and AI/ML trade-offs are yours to make as the feature demands. The bar is a genuine generalist: the product judgement to decide what's worth building, and the technical range to go build it.

Month 1: You own a feature outright. Something you shipped is in front of closed-beta users, and you've already iterated on it once from what they told you.

Month 3: You've made the product measurably better on the things users feel, whether that's ASR latency, small-word accuracy, watch reliability or agent responsiveness. You have a view on what should come next and you're building toward it.

Who thrives here:

• You've shipped consumer product across more than one surface. Mobile, desktop, wearable, backend; at least two of them, end to end, in front of real users. The layers you own personally matter more than the platforms on your resume.
• You bring work nobody assigned you. You spot the problem, write the PR, and arrive at standup with the ticket already filed. There is no backlog here to hide behind and no project manager to wait on.
• You investigate before you patch. Told that something feels slow, your instinct is to understand why rather than to ship a fix that makes the symptom go away.

Some nice-to-haves:

• iOS, watchOS, or other wearable development
• Speech and audio ML pipelines, or on-device models
• Agent and LLM feature building in production
• A hardware-adjacent startup background

Why this role?

Everyone is building an AI assistant. Almost nobody has the device, the on-device experience and the founding team that has already done this once. This company does, and it's pre-launch, which means the product surface you'd own is still yours to shape rather than inherit.

Founding-engineer equity, a team small enough that your decisions stick, and direct influence over the product, the stack and who gets hired next. The San Francisco team is expected to grow several times over within the year. Hybrid in SF.

Brand on your resume matters less here than most places. The hiring manager was explicit that a strong work trial outweighs a recognisable employer.

About the hiring process

This role is being filled through Cruitical's assessment platform. Everyone who applies gets an actual shot at the role and guaranteed actionable feedback.

Instead of six rounds of interviews, you'll complete a structured work simulation that mirrors the actual job. You'll work with real tools, solve an ambiguous problem, and demonstrate how you think. The company gets signal on what you can actually do. You get signal on whether this is work you'd enjoy.

You do this once, and we match you to fitting jobs at accelerated stages. Fair, and fast, for everyone involved.

Apply here or reach out to learn more about the company.