Lead AI Engineer - Conversational Intelligence & Memory Architecture

This role is US-based only. We do not offer visa sponsorship. No agencies or offshore applicants.You must be legally authorized to work in the United States.Role: AI Engineer (Founding / Lead)Compensation: $175,000 Salary + EquityLocation: San Francsico or Miami, FLWho This Role Is Perfect ForThis role is for a true builder. Someone who takes real pride in what goes live, feels full accountability for quality in production, and wants ownership over outcomes, not just tasks.The right person is technically sharp, moves with urgency, has strong product taste, and genuinely cares about building something people can trust. They do not hide behind specs or wait to be told what to do. They spot problems early, solve them well, and want the responsibility that comes with helping build something meaningful from the ground up.About CapsuleCapsule is building an AI system that captures, organizes, and interacts with human memory, personality, and voice. Our AI interviewer (“Remi”) conducts guided reminiscence, while Capsule becomes a living, evolving model of a person—shaped by stories, preferences, relationships, and recorded voice.This is not a toy chatbot. This is identity, memory, and legacy—and it requires taste, rigor, and care.The RoleWe’re looking for a senior AI builder who wants to step into a CTO-type role and architect Capsule’s intelligence layer end-to-end. You’ll own how memory is captured, structured, retrieved, and experienced—and how the system improves over time through evaluation, iteration, and production learning.You’ll be hands-on: designing the architecture, writing code, shipping to production, and partnering directly with the founder on roadmap and product decisions.What You’ll DoArchitect the intelligence layer powering Remi and Capsule–includes memory ingestion, structuring, retrieval, and long-term context.Build the memory system (schemas/representations, embeddings + retrieval, summarization, entity/relationship tracking, user controls).Improve conversation quality: coherence, emotional attunement, safety, and consistency across long time horizons.Design and run evaluation: offline test sets, golden conversations, automated scoring, regression tests, and online quality monitoring.Own experimentation to production: prototype quickly, validate with users, deploy, monitor, iterate.Make infrastructure decisions: model/provider strategy, pipelines, observability, latency/cost tradeoffs, data privacy and retention.Partner with product/design to translate human needs (trust, grief, family dynamics, legacy) into robust technical systems.Lead technically as the team grows: set standards, mentor, and help define hiring priorities over time.What We’re Looking ForShipped an LLM product to production with real users (quality + reliability mattered).Hands-on with RAG/retrieval, embeddings, tool/function calling, and orchestration.Built evaluation/monitoring (offline + online) and iterated based on data.Strong engineering fundamentals (APIs, data modeling, security/privacy basics, observability).Bonus PointsFormer technical founder or early-stage startup lead (0 to 1, shipping under constraints).Experience with voice (STT, diarization, voice cloning/synthesis, audio pipelines).Background in NLP, cognitive science, psychology, or human-centered AI.Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows (Cursor/Codex or similar) to move faster.