About the Role
Listen is building the human layer of AI, creating a bridge between AI systems and what humans actually want. The company is Sequoia-backed, has raised $100M, and serves customers like Anthropic, Google, and Cursor. As a Member of Technical Staff in Agent Engineering, you will be crucial in building a complex AI-native product within a small team of experienced builders. The platform runs AI-moderated video interviews at massive scale, finding the right people, conducting thousands of open-ended conversations in parallel, and surfacing insights for product development. The ultimate goal is to build a Human API, simulating human behavior and preferences at scale, which AI agents can query for grounded answers, leading to closed-loop product development at AI speed.
Company Highlights
- Series B with $100M raised from Sequoia, Conviction, Ribbit, AI Grant, and Pear VC.
- Selective team of <20 engineers including VC-backed founders, IOI medalists, and engineers from Jane Street and Tesla Autopilot.
- Customers include Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Google, Microsoft, Robinhood, Nestlé, P&G, and Sweetgreen.
- Post-PMF growth: 20x year-over-year revenue.
- Huge market: clear path to $1M+ contracts at over 50% of the Fortune 2000.
Technical Challenges
- Database of Humanity: Maintaining a database of millions of people, matching profiles based on voice, face, and device IDs to track opinions, prevent fraud, and find niche audiences.
- Emotional Intelligence: Developing AI interviewers that read tone, hesitation, and facial micro-expressions to go beyond transcripts and surpass human capabilities.
- Preference Model: Researching how to update and refresh the human preference model, identify high-signal questions, and quantify prediction uncertainty.
- Human API: Embedding the model of millions of humans into various decision-making tools like Slack, Linear, IDEs, and coding agents to enable real-time human feedback.
- Agent Evals: Building AI-first product components like Study Composer and Research Agent, and critically, evaluating their qualitative outputs to enable continuous improvement.
What we look for
- You solve problems end to end: Ownership of a part of the product and making decisions across the LLM pipeline, infrastructure, backend, and UX.
- You're a future or past founder: Ability to scope your own work, think about customers, and own decisions.
- You care about getting things right: Prioritizing 100% solutions and going to root cause when issues arise, while also moving fast.
- You're excited about pushing LLMs to their limits: Working directly with frontier model labs and constantly probing their boundaries.
- You communicate complex ideas in writing: Using writing for working through tradeoffs, problems, and decisions due to independent work culture.
- You're highly technical: A strong background in coding and a deep interest in technical details from language design to compilers.
Life at Listen Labs
- Competitive Compensation: Competitive compensation packages with meaningful equity, backed by world-class investors.
- Benefits that Support You: Comprehensive healthcare and dental coverage, flexible time off, and an environment that values balance and trust.
- Room to Grow: Opportunities to take on new responsibilities, shape processes, and grow with the company.