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Lead Product Engineer | 36labs

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Role

  • Lead Product Engineer
  • Company:

36 Labs

Location

London, on site four days a week. The office is on Baker Street and moves to Primrose Hill within a couple of months. London-based candidates only.

Job Type

  • Full-time
  • About 36 Labs
  • 36 Labs is an applied AI research firm in London. It is working on a gap in today's models: they are weak at creative decisions and at explaining why a decision was made. The team's thesis is that if you solve creativity in LLMs, you have largely solved what captures human attention.
  • The product is a harness that sits over any frontier model, especially video generation models. It runs ideation, generation and distribution end to end. Content goes out to real audiences, and a data loop improves the harness over time.
  • The company is profitable and works with Sony, Warner and Universal through bespoke marketing partnerships. Marketing is the proof of concept, not the destination. A B2C offering is due very soon. V3 of the harness is being released internally, and it is a big scope of work.
  • The team is ten people, with four engineers working under a CTO who is still hands-on in the code. The seed round closes in the next couple of weeks. This is a new stage of growth, not a replacement hire.

What you are expected to do

  • Own the upcoming B2C product end to end, from launch: an AI-native, customer-facing product where UX matters as much as the models behind it.
  • Lead product engineering: make product calls with the founders, set the bar for how things get shipped, and help shape the team as it grows.
  • Work across the stack on the harness and the products around it. The structure is flat, so engineers work on a bit of everything, depending on what is needed.
  • Help build and ship on top of V3 of the harness as it moves from internal release into wider use.
  • Take ownership of your pieces of work and move them forward with little hand-holding.
  • Work closely with the CTO and the other engineers, and explain your ideas back to the team.

What you need to succeed

  • You have four or more years of hands-on engineering experience, including in the AI-native era.
  • You have owned something before, and you can point to it.
  • You take the lead. You see what needs doing and start, without waiting to be told.
  • You communicate well. You explain your thinking clearly and enjoy discussing it.
  • You live in London and are happy to be in the office four days a week.
  • You do not need visa sponsorship at this stage. The company cannot sponsor until about February next year. A visa that runs well past February is fine.
  • You work with Python, TypeScript and Postgres, and you know LLM and generative model APIs and open-weight models.
  • You build and run back-end systems in production, including deployment and operation. This is a strong plus.
  • You keep up with the latest stacks, models and engineering practices, and you have side projects beyond your degree or day job.
  • A degree in computer science, engineering, maths, stats or similar is a plus, and so is an MSc or PhD. The university matters little, and experience matters more.
  • Experience in applied generative media or creative companies, such as Fal, is a plus. What you have built matters more than who you built it for.
  • A notice period of one month is fine.

What you get

  • A seed-stage company with a profitable track record since it began operating.
  • A strong CV line, and the chance to learn a lot quickly.
  • Clear room to grow into a more senior role. The long-term plan is for the CTO to move to strategy and the bigger picture.
  • Work on a problem few companies are tackling, with an extremely high ceiling.
  • Real clients from day one, including Sony, Warner and Universal.
  • A small, flat team of ten, with direct access to the CTO and the founders.

How to apply

Send your LinkedIn profile or CV to Alexander at the agency. We start with a short screening call. After that, the process runs as follows. First, a first-round interview with Benedict, head of operations, covering your projects, CV and motivation. Second, a technical interview with the CTO of about half an hour. Third, a take-home technical assessment. If the team cannot decide between candidates, there may be a final onsite round where you work on something in front of the team. Strong candidates may go straight to the CTO.