Full-Time

Member of Engineering

Evaluations

poolside

poolside

201-500 employees

Develops AI tools for software development

No salary listed

Remote in UK

Hybrid

Remote within the EMEA/East Coast region, with monthly three-day in-person gatherings and longer offsites twice a year.

Category
AI & Machine Learning (1)
Required Skills
LLM
Python
Linux/Unix

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Requirements
  • Experience with large language models, including a strong understanding of their capabilities and limitations.
  • A strong engineering background with strong programming skills across multiple languages.
  • Familiarity with the full software development life cycle.
  • Programming experience with Linux, strong algorithmic skills, and multiple programming languages including Python.
  • Familiarity with modern software development tools.
  • Strong critical thinking and the ability to question code quality policies when applicable.
Responsibilities
  • Research and implement evaluations and benchmarks for both base models and instruction-following models.
  • Collaborate with applied research and product teams to define meaningful metrics and evaluations that capture progress on real-world software development skills.
  • Plan future steps, discuss work, and communicate clearly with peers as part of a team.

Poolside.ai builds AI-powered tools to help with software development. Its products assist coding and software design for developers, with the long-term aim of enabling anyone, even those without technical skills, to build software through AI-guided, human-assisted interactions. The tools work by providing AI that can understand problems, reason about solutions, and plan development steps, delivered via a subscription model that gives customers access to the software and services (with potential for licensing the technology to others). The company differentiates itself by pursuing democratization of software creation—making AI-assisted coding and design accessible to a broader audience—and by combining automated AI capabilities with human guidance. Its goal is to make software development faster and cheaper, expand AI-driven creation into other fields, and scale its capabilities through ongoing iterations and licensing opportunities.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Growth Equity (Venture Capital)

Total Funding

$1.6B

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2023

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Laguna S 2.1 launched July 21, 2026 and topped coding benchmarks.
  • Nvidia's August 2026 $1 billion investment valued Poolside at $12 billion pre-money.
  • OpenRouter, Hugging Face, and AI Gateway broaden distribution beyond direct enterprise sales.

What critics are saying

  • Nvidia's August 20, 2026 deal transfers 109 employees, hollowing Poolside's execution engine.
  • Poolside now depends on Nvidia licensing and capital, tying strategy to one dominant buyer.
  • Open-weight coding models face brutal commoditization from Qwen, DeepSeek, and NVIDIA.

What makes poolside unique

  • Laguna S 2.1 targets agentic coding with 1M-token context and open weights.
  • Poolside trains sparse MoE models on 4,096 H200s, then ships local-friendly variants.
  • Atos partnered with Poolside in March 2026 for sovereign enterprise deployments.

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Benefits

Health Insurance

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Flexible Work Hours

Remote Work Options

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

7%

1 year growth

5%

2 year growth

21%
Toscale
Aug 21st, 2026
Nvidia pays $7B for Poolside's Model Factory in licensing deal that avoids acquisition scrutiny

Nvidia has paid $7 billion for a non-exclusive licence to Poolside AI's Model Factory system and taken a minority stake in the company, according to reports from Newcomer, Bloomberg, and The Information. The deal includes a $6 billion licensing fee and a $1 billion investment at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The transaction follows similar arrangements with Groq ($20 billion) and Enfabrica ($900 million). By structuring deals as licensing agreements rather than acquisitions, Nvidia avoids antitrust scrutiny whilst securing access to critical AI infrastructure and talent. In this case, 109 Poolside employees are transferring to Nvidia, though co-founders Jason Warner and Eiso Kant remain to lead the independent entity. Poolside's existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, eBay, and Citi Ventures, are expected to receive the $6 billion licensing payment by end-2027.

The Information
Aug 20th, 2026
Nvidia to Reportedly Pay $6 Billion in Licensing and Hiring Deal with AI Model Startup Poolside

Nvidia has agreed to pay $6 billion to license AI model-development software from startup Poolside, the startup told investors in a letter first reported by Newcomer . Poolside was an early developer of a coding AI agent and pivoted to developing data centers before releasing its own open source AI model using Nvidia server chips. The startup’s letter said Nvidia would make offers to hire 109

X Corp.
Aug 20th, 2026
Poolside AI strikes $6B Nvidia licensing deal alongside $1B investment at $12B pre-money valuation

Eric Newcomer reports that Poolside AI has agreed a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, alongside a $1B Nvidia investment at a $12B pre-money valuation.

Newcomer
Aug 20th, 2026
Poolside strikes $6B licensing deal with Nvidia and raises $1B at $12B valuation

Poolside AI has struck a $6 billion non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia, according to a letter to investors obtained by Newcomer. The AI model-building startup also raised $1 billion from Nvidia at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The dual transaction represents one of the largest deals in the AI sector. Nvidia's licensing agreement gives it access to Poolside's technology, whilst the investment cements a strategic partnership between the two companies. Details about the specific technology being licensed or terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The deal underscores the growing value of AI model developers as large tech companies seek to expand their capabilities.

Associated Press
Jul 21st, 2026
Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, the West's most capable open-weight coding model

Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight AI model designed for coding tasks. The model matches the performance of systems several times its size on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, competing with models from DeepSeek, NVIDIA, and Thinking Machines. The model is compact enough to run on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark and is available on Hugging Face under an OpenMDW-1.1 license. Poolside trained it in under four weeks using 4,000 H200 GPUs. The release addresses growing demand for open-weight models that organisations can download and run on their own infrastructure for compliance and cost reasons. Co-CEO Jason Warner said Laguna S 2.1 provides "a model that enterprises and governments can put into production today, on their own hardware, at a cost that makes agentic coding practical at scale.