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Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Shape Sophia's core experience alongside the founders while shipping quickly across the stack.
About Sophia
Sophia is an end-to-end agentic matchmaker using advanced language and computer-vision models to deliver deeply tailored introductions.
Role Overview
Work directly with the founders and early team to refine, improve, and scale Sophia's core experience through full-stack engineering and rapid prototyping.
About Sophia
- We harness AI to help people forge deeper, more meaningful relationships.
- Sophia was founded by two successful serial entrepreneurs, incubated in their venture studio, with leading high profile founders as advisors and investors.
Role Overview
Blend full-stack engineering, rapid prototyping, and hands-on user observation. Sit in on real voice sessions, identify friction or gaps, and ship improvements quickly across the product and AI layers.
- Move between architecture, backend development, prompting, conversational logic, and real-time debugging.
- Be one of the first engineers shaping how Sophia works in the real world.
Core Responsibilities
User-Embedded Product & Engineering
- Join live onboarding calls and member conversations to understand user behavior.
- Identify issues in voice flow, prompting, matching logic, and UX — and translate them into immediate refinements.
- Work closely with founders on building and iterating the end-to-end AI experience.
Full-Stack Feature Development
- Build and maintain features across the stack (front end, back end, data, and AI interfaces).
- Improve workflows for voice interviews, dossier creation, matching, and SMS-based interactions.
- Ship rapid prototypes and production-ready changes in short cycles.
AI + Prompt Integration
- Refine prompt pipelines, conversation logic, and multimodal reasoning flows.
- Work with AI/ML teammates to integrate model endpoints and improve system performance.
- Debug voice, reasoning, or behavioral issues in live environments.
Architecture & Technical Ownership
- Contribute to architectural decisions across voice, vision, memory, and data.
- Help plan and implement new integrations, such as social media ingestion or expanded data sources.
- Build internal tools that accelerate testing, evaluation, and deployment.
Reliability & Observability
- Monitor key user journeys and proactively resolve issues.
- Improve system resilience, logging, and data handling across the platform.
- Ensure responsible management of user data and PII.
Requirements
Technical Skills
- Strong experience with modern web technologies on both front end and back end.
- Comfortable working with Python, Node, or similar server-side environments.
- Experience building or integrating AI-powered features (LLM APIs, embeddings, tools).
- Ability to reason across the entire stack — from API design to prompt structure to deployment.
- Strong debugging and problem-solving abilities, especially in ambiguous situations.
Preferred Experience
- Exposure to conversational interfaces, AI agents, or voice systems.
- Prior work in early-stage or fast-moving product environments.
- Experience joining user calls or working closely with non-technical stakeholders.
- Familiarity with event-driven systems, queues, or background workers.
Who Thrives Here
- Smart, fast learner with strong fundamentals.
- Low-ego, humble, and curious — comfortable starting from first principles.
- Enjoys sitting with users, seeing real behaviors, and improving the product based on what they observe.
- Adaptive and willing to move quickly between tasks and problem domains.
Engagement
- Full-time role; contract-to-hire or W2 options available.
- Location flexible (Chicago, Miami, or New York preferred; remote possible).