Job Description
Senior Engineer / Tech Lead — Real-Time AI Avatars We're building Living Forever AI. We capture a person's voice, stories, and personality and turn them into interactive video avatars their family can actually talk to — for generations. 1,000+ on the waitlist. Launching in 30 days. The problem you'd own Utterance-to-utterance latency. The gap between when a user speaks and when the avatar responds is the difference between magic and uncanny. Cutting that latency across the LLM + RAG + voice + video pipeline is our hardest engineering problem and the single biggest lever for product quality. If you've shipped real-time conversational AI and you want to own this end-to-end, keep reading. The role Senior IC who codes most of the time and coordinates two offshore contractors. You'd own architecture, ship production code, and make the technical calls that determine whether we win this category. Not a pure management role — we want a builder who can lead. Reports to founder. Day-one ownership of the AI pipeline. You've shipped Frontend TypeScript + React in production Tailwind CSS Backend Deep PostgreSQL — RLS, functions, triggers, migrations (not basic SQL) Supabase Edge Functions or comparable serverless REST + webhook integration patterns AI / ML LLM + RAG pipelines in production Real-time conversational AI — video preferred (Tavus, HeyGen, D-ID); voice agents qualify (Vapi, Retell, or comparable) Voice AI / voice cloning (ElevenLabs or comparable) Compensation $3,500/month cash stipend (contractor) $125K/year salary accrual — converts to back-pay on close of our first priced round 4% equity, 4-year vest, 1-year cliff The cash is light because we're pre-revenue at scale. The equity is real. If we hit our model, this is a meaningful number. If you want a cushy comp package, this isn't the job. If you want ownership of a category-defining product, it is. About us Founder is a serial entrepreneur — 8 companies, 4 exits, two-time WSJ bestselling author. COO ran $10B+ in revenue impact at Pure Storage and Lumen. Patent filed. ElevenLabs AI Grant. NVIDIA Inception. Selected for Startup Grind Global 2026. Bootstrapped to launch. Raising on traction, not promises. Logistics Remote. We need 2 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time. Pace is fast — we're shipping a product, not a side project. If this sounds like the problem you want to solve, send a note with: a project you've shipped that involved real-time AI, your GitHub if you have one.