AI-Focused Founding Engineer

Job Description

Note: This is not a remote role. We work in a hybrid setup–working in person in a beautiful New York office near Grand Central Station 3 to 5 times per week.

Persona’s mission is to enable every company to deeply understand its users and build for their needs – reinventing how products are built and the $80B+ market research industry. Our first product is an AI qualitative researcher that talks to customers and generates insights. Persona is already being used by builders at some of the biggest product-led brands in the world. We have an ambitious roadmap that goes far beyond this – and we’re now excited to expand our team.

We’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff to join us in-person in New York City. You’ll be joining the team best positioned to win this market – we’re former founding team members and senior leaders from some of the highest-growth consumer brands of the past decade, including Lyft, Ro and You.com.

About You

• Thrive in a high-agency, fast-moving environment; you own problems and drive solutions.
• Self-motivated, intellectually curious, and proactive about figuring things out.
• Communicate clearly, collaborate well, and value kindness and humility.
• Shipped and maintained production features end-to-end, across backend and frontend.
• Deep experience with LLMs and NLP, TTS, or STT models
• Expert Python developer with strong backend engineering and API design skills
• Strong database experience (PostgreSQL).
• Proficient with AWS (Lambda, ECS/ECR, VPC, Cognito, CloudWatch), and infrastructure-as-code (CDK/Terraform).
• Big pluses:
• PhD or Master’s in AI or Computer Science (or equivalent experience).
• Research publications in AI, ML, NLP, or related fields.
• Built full-stack features using Next.js/React and TypeScript.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, ECR/ECS, or Kubernetes).
• Experience with agent frameworks, vector databases, and statistical analysis in Python or R.
• Understanding of data privacy and PII-scrubbing techniques.
  

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable backend services and AI pipelines.
• Orchestrate LLMs, vector search, TTS/STT, and agent frameworks for real-world use.
• Lead infrastructure and deployment on AWS; manage CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensure security, privacy and compliance for our customers.
• Design scalable solutions, and deploy and monitor them in production.
  
  

Why join us

• High-impact, fast-moving team with strong early traction and real customer demand.
• Meaningful equity and compensation with long-term conviction.
• Massive ownership from day one - not just of code, but of product direction, customer outcomes and company cultures.
  
  

Compensation

0.3% - 2% equity ownership $120k - $200k salary

Persona's mission is to enable every company to deeply understand its users and build for their needs – reinventing how products are built and the $80B+ market research industry. Our first product is an AI qualitative researcher that talks to customers and generates insights. Persona is already being used by builders at some of the biggest product-led brands in the world.