About the role
About Willow
Willow is a voice-first productivity app that lets you type anywhere on your computer using your voice. People rely on Willow every day to write emails, respond in Slack, prompt AI, take notes, and move faster through their work.
We’ve proven adoption from individual power users to enterprises like Uber, Gusto, and Heidi Health. We’re backed by Y Combinator, Box Group, and founders from Instacart, Reddit, Shopify, and HubSpot.
We’re scaling quickly, and you’ll be joining early.
The Role
We’re looking for a Founding ML Research Engineer to build Willow’s personalization layer.
This role is for someone who believes the hardest unsolved problem in AI products is not raw model capability, but context and user modeling. Foundation models are getting better every month. The open question is how to build an AI system that understands a specific user in the flow of their work.
You’ll work on the systems that turn Willow from “great dictation” into a personalized communication and intent layer.
Today, a user can say something rough like: “Tell my boss I’ll come in at 6.”
Willow should understand the screen, the relationship, the app, the user’s tone, their past edits, their communication style, and produce the message the user would have written if they had taken the time to write it well.
What You’ll Work On
You’ll help build systems for:
1. Personal writing and behavior models that learn from edits, preferences, workflows, tone, formatting, and user actions
2. Intent-to-action systems that turn rough user intent into high-quality execution
3. Multimodal context understanding across voice, screenshots, app state, selected text, workflows, and historical behavior
4. Retrieval and memory systems that understand what context matters in a given moment
