Software Engineer

Spectral Labs is building foundation models for engineering physical systems.

We’re hiring an AI Engineer capable of building the product surface, the agent layer that sits on top of our models, and the glue that holds both together. We want someone who loves coding strategically and constantly seeks to optimize development speed. You live in Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor, and you’ve developed real craft at directing them: how you scope a task, what context you hand over, when you let an agent run and when you take the wheel back. You’d be frustrated somewhere that treated this as a side experiment rather than the way the work gets done. The expectation that comes with that leverage is real. One person here should cover ground that would conventionally take several.

This is a fully in-person role at our office in SF, with an expectation of at least 60 hours per week.

Responsibilities

• •Build and own the product surface end to end: the application, the APIs, and the backend that put our models in front of working engineers.
• •Build the agent layer on top of our models: tool use, orchestration, retrieval, and the loops that turn raw model output into something an engineer can edit and trust.
• •Design and maintain the evals for everything you ship. Non-deterministic output without measurement is a demo, not a product.
• •Handle the CAD-adjacent engineering the product requires: format conversion, geometry data wrangling, and the glue between our pipelines and the application.
• •Make the infrastructure calls that come with owning a product surface at an early company: deployment, observability, latency, and cost.
• •Work directly with research on what the model needs to do differently for the product to work, and with the product team on what users actually hit.
• •Push how we all build. You’ll set the internal bar for agentic coding workflows, and what you figure out should make everyone else faster too.

Qualifications

• •You code with Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor every day, and you have genuine craft at it. We want to hear about your workflow: how you break work down, what context you give, where you’ve learned not to trust the output.
• •You’ve shipped production software that real users depended on, and you can point to it.
• •Strong general engineering ability across the stack. You’ve built backends, APIs, and user-facing applications, and you don’t need a specialist to unblock you on any of them.
• •Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production. Not a demo or a weekend project, but something that met real inputs and real failure.
• •You’ve built or maintained evals, and you know why the first set everyone writes is misleading.
• •Good judgment about where AI tooling helps and where it produces confident garbage. Enthusiasm without that judgment is a liability at this speed.
• •Proficiency in Python plus at least one of TypeScript or C++, and comfort moving between them.
• •Comfort with a high-ownership environment and an ambiguous landscape. You’ll pick problems as much as you’re handed them.
• •Experience solving problems that stump others. You have to love the process of solving hard problems.

Strong Plus

• You’ve built agentic systems that survived contact with real users, and you can talk concretely about what broke and how you fixed it.
• You’ve built your own tooling around coding agents: harnesses, context pipelines, custom commands, evaluation loops.
• Experience with generative models where output quality was contested and you had to define what good meant before you could ship.
• Exposure to CAD, 3D geometry, graphics, or simulation.
• Experience as an early engineer at a startup where you built the product surface from nothing.
• Open-source contributions, or a tool people adopted without you promoting it.
• Experience with inference serving, latency optimization, or running models in production.
• A mechanical engineering or manufacturing background. You’d be one of very few people who understands both sides of what we’re building.
• High GPA in a competitive undergrad program.
• Objectively impressive achievements in any domain. Built something unusual? Won something hard? We want to hear about it.

Visa Sponsorship

We fully sponsor visas end-to-end. We’ve done it before, we have immigration counsel, and if we want to hire you, we don’t want paperwork to get in the way. If we make you an offer, we’ll put real resources and effort behind getting you here. The process can be slow, frustrating, and stressful, but we’ll handle the heavy lifting on our end so you can focus on what you’re great at.