About the Role
We’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff to shape how we build and what’s possible, whether that means exploring new tech stacks, optimizing infra, or prototyping weird but brilliant ideas. You might be a former technical founder or a CTO who loves building leverage for others, or someone who excels at bringing zero-to-one ideas to life.
If you thrive in the unknown, move fast, and can architect, prototype, or scale systems depending on the day -- this would be the perfect role for you. You’ll be a key contributor in shaping our technical foundation, supporting other engineers, and unlocking velocity for the entire team.
Responsibilities
Own critical infrastructure and technical architecture decisions
Prototype new ideas, tools, and internal systems — often with no roadmap
Identify bottlenecks in our stack and build systems that multiply team productivity
Partner with engineers and researchers to explore new capabilities, enabling rapid prototyping and experimentation
Contribute to defining engineering best practices and technical direction
Contribute to or lead the development of open source tools and infrastructure components
Identify bottlenecks across our dev stack and create systems that multiply team velocity
You might be a fit if
You’ve been a technical founder, staff engineer, or CTO in fast-paced environments
You’ve built or contributed to open sourced tech with real-world adoption
You think in systems and love building high quality infrastructure that enables others to build faster and better
What makes us interesting
Small, elite team of ex-founders, researchers from top AI Labs, top CS grads, and engineers from top companies
True ownership You will not be blocked by bureaucracy, shipping meaningful work within weeks rather than months
Serious momentum We're well-funded by top investors, moving fast, and focused on execution
What we do
Ship consumer products powered by cutting-edge AI research, and
Build infrastructure that facilitates research and product, and
Innovate cutting-edge research that will open up new consumer product forms
The Details
Full-time, onsite role in Menlo Park (we're opening an office in SF as well)
Startup hours apply
Generous salary, with additional benefits to be discussed during the hiring process
Top Skills
What We Do
Fundamental Research Labs is building digital humans—machines with the capacity to learn, care, and grow alongside us.
We're an applied research company building autonomous, collaborative, and socially intelligent agents. Our small team includes computational neuroscientists, AI researchers, engineers, and builders from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, and beyond.
Our research prototypes began with multi-agent experiments in games like Minecraft and Roblox, where over a million people have interacted with our agents. Today, we're bringing those agents out of the sandbox and into the real world—starting with your computer.
