Senior Software Engineer

About P-1 AI:

We are building an engineering AGI. We founded P-1 AI with the conviction that the greatest impact of artificial intelligence will be on the built world. Our first product is Archie, an AI engineer capable of quantitative intuition over physical product domains and engineering tool use. Archie initially performs at the level of an entry-level design engineer but rapidly gets smarter and more capable. We aim to put an Archie on every engineering team at every industrial company on earth.

Our founding team includes the top minds in deep learning, model-based engineering, and industries that are our customers. We closed a $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures that includes a number of other AI and industrial luminaries (from OpenAI, DeepMind, etc.).

About the role:
We’re a small team tackling an ambitious problem. At the core of our solution is an intelligent, agentic platform that acts as a tireless teammate which can perform all of the same actions that human engineers can, from developing an intuition about the company’s products and the physics at play in their design, to accessing and using information systems, to decomposing performance requirements and developing them into design solutions. Archie must be scalable, responsive, and competent, and must also be deployable within the corporate networks of our customers so that he can see their most valuable information and do his job well.

Our Senior SWE for the Agentic AI Platform will design and implement solutions for these challenges, which range from classic distributed systems, integration, and security work, to robustly implementing advanced intelligence features developed by our AI research team. Ownership comes by default, but as Archie becomes more sophisticated we also have potential growth into technical leadership for specific specialty areas.

This role can be either remote (based in the US or Canada and with existing work authorization) or based in our San Mateo Bay Area office. If you are remote, you should plan to spend one week per quarter co-working with the rest of the company in our San Mateo office, with the occasional team travel workshop in between. We will support relocation for candidates interested in moving to the Bay Area.

What you’ll do:

• Work with our team to understand our Archie capability roadmap and decompose capabilities into technical development.

• Turn capability prototypes and PoCs from our AI research team into robust, scalable implementations.

• Diagnose and solve technical problems identified by our team or users.

• Develop and act on automated platform tests, including traditional software testing, agentic AI evals, and infrastructure.

• Improve Archie’s scalability and robustness through system architecture design and implementation.

Who you are:

• You’ve consistently taken technical ownership of production-grade software.

• You’re experienced with application development in Python.

• You’ve built and implemented data models and database interactions.

• You develop an obsession with understanding your users’ goals and incorporating this knowledge into your solutions.

• Take pride in developing quality code and practices.

• Are aggressively seeking ways to use AI better in your own workflows.

Our values:

Mission obsession & urgency: We are obsessed with building engineering AGI as quickly as possible. We also recognize that as a startup, speed is our most precious competitive advantage. We are constantly asking ourselves what we can do to go faster. We make tradeoffs and sacrifices (personally and in the workplace) in exchange for speed.

Intellectual excellence & curiosity: We ask “what if?” and experiment liberally. We always look for better ways of doing something. We read voraciously. We challenge each other to be better. We surround ourselves with A players and we actively and unapologetically reject B players (and even B+ players⸺because they tend to surround themselves with C players).

Shipping discipline: We treat production with respect. We test and demo our product constantly. We listen attentively to our customers, users, and stakeholders, and we respect our commitments to them. We also respect our commitments to each other and will go the extra mile (or ten or one hundred) to honor them.

Ownership: We all have significant ownership stakes in the company and operate in founder mode. We believe in hierarchical requirements but not in hierarchical information flows. If we see that something is broken or can be done better, we flag it and we fix it. We encourage each other to play with and fix anything and everything... but there’s a clear owner for everything.

Interview process:

• Initial screening call (30 mins)

• Biographical/behavioural interview (45 mins)

• Technical interview (60 mins)

• CEO interview (30 mins)

Compensation:

Salary: $200k - $250k.

This role includes a significant equity component. We are an early-stage startup, so we favor equity over cash in our current compensation philosophy. This role is best suited for candidates who value long-term ownership and impact over short-term cash optimization. Our benefits include healthcare, dental, and vision insurance, 401k with employer matching, unlimited PTO.