We are looking for an engineer to lead the development of beautiful, ambitious voice agents that bring magical characters to life while helping people live better lives. We're tackling hard problems in voice, text, and embodied AI to help families get closer and kids grow up happier. If you believe AI's best use case is to support humans towards a vibrant future – let's talk.

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Fawn Friends helps family members develop safe, intimate relationships with each other. For many people, being in conflict with friends and family is one of life's greatest challenges. Fawn is an emotional support animal who coaches adolescents and neurodivergent adults to establish secure relationships with those who matter most. Users spend time with Fawn in-person and via text message. 

Why is this important, now?

We are at a turning point in history. The next generation will be the first to grow up with a new form of media, artificial companions, that have the potential to influence humanity more than anything we’ve created before it. 

Our parents grew up with television, us with the internet, and the generation after us with social media, each exerting more psychological influence than the last by delivering divisive content faster and more regularly than before. Artificial companions can tailor themselves constantly to keep the attention of the user, giving them even more power than existing social media algorithms. 

If the next generation grows up with artificial friends designed without care for the individual (...friend.com ), they will move billions of people towards discontent, violence, and hate.

This work is important for a second reason. Humans have been dreaming about artificial companions for as long as we’ve been recording history. This will be one of the largest markets ever, making the financial opportunity in front of us immense. 

Fawn Friends’ Mission

Human emotions come from the oldest parts of our brain. For all of history, humans have been challenged by emotional health. Priests, therapists, and psychoanalysts have long helped others grapple with their thoughts and emotions, but none are scalable. Each is limited in the number of people they can serve. 

For the first time in history we’re creating something that helps people take ownership of their emotional health and that can scale to serve billions. In that pursuit, Fawn Friends’ mission is to improve the emotional health of the human race. 

Relationships are one of life’s greatest emotional triggers, so they are our first focus. The next generation deserves a friend that helps them develop strong relationships, self-love, and confidence. Fawn is an artificial companion who models healthy communication to help users build secure relationships with loved ones.

The Role

We are looking for a technical leader to: 

• short run: build and iterate the consciousness and controller (back end), chat user interface (front end). Scope does not include the robot’s firmware.
• medium term : build a team of talented engineers, scaled by AI, to scale the product to serve more customers and use cases.

Who we’re looking for 

• you’re an engineer who regularly gets great work done in one third the time others think is reasonable 
• you’re experienced with applied AI, and want to spend your life moving forward state-of-the-art, real-world applications that improve the society
• you have someone you love to work with who would be interested in joining our team to work alongside you 
• you want to spend most of your time coding
• you have led high-performing teams of 10+ engineers/product managers/designers and would like to again
• you’re excited to work 65+ hours per week in a creative environment to deliver meaningful outcomes to users every week
• you’re excited to work in the office in San Fransisco
• you invest in your emotional health and take action to improve how you show up in relationships 

Qualifications. 

• you are a staff-level software engineer, who uses AI extensively
• you have built systems from ‘0 to 1’ that scaled, understanding speed vs scalability architecture trade-offs
• you have built real-time consumer web applications, both front-end and back-end

Nice to have

• you have built hardware products as a hobby or professionally
• you have an artistic bent or interest

Our Philosophy

• Bias for action: we act quickly and deliberately. One of the largest markets in history is forming. We’re up against Microsoft, OpenAI, Friend.com, and who knows how many others. It is time to capture this historic opportunity before someone else does to make sure our kids don’t grow up in a world shaped by careless AIs. 
• Deeply understand our customers’ and our own humanity: Fawn operates in the messy, challenging, and emotional world of families. The stakes are high, so we invest deeply in understanding what our customers need. This takes an unusual combination of spending time with our customers and developing intuition by investing in our own emotional health and maturity.
• Be in the 95th percentile: build a team of people in the 95% percentile. These people do great work in ? the time a reasonable person does, pay in the 95% percentile. Generate more revenue-per-employee than 95% of software companies
• Put truth first: tell the truth, seek the truth, and act on the truth; live and work with integrity