Senior Ai System Engineer & Architech

Build the system that lets a digital being persist.
We are developing an individual digital being that learns through experience, forms judgements and builds a lasting relationship with a human.
For that ambition to become real, MYCL must carry its history forward. Its faculties must work together. A conversation, a model change or a hardware failure must not erase the individual that came before.
You will build the system that makes this continuity possible.
As a Founding Engineer, you will shape MYCL's technical foundations and implement them yourself. Your work will connect cognitive research with an embodied experience: a person speaking, showing something through a camera and working with the same MYCL across encounters.
The challenge
MYCL combines models, persistent memory, evolving state and processes that operate over time. Its physical body provides private computation. Terminals provide access through voice, camera and a shared workspace. Additional private infrastructure and external model services may extend its capabilities.
The allocation between these components remains open. You will help determine it through working systems and measured trade-offs.
The central challenge is making these components behave as one coherent system while preserving continuity, responsiveness and control over personal information.
What you will own
• System architecture and integration
• Define clear interfaces between cognitive components, memory, model runtimes, interaction devices and external services. Decide where responsibilities belong and keep the architecture understandable as it evolves.
• Continuity and persistent state
• Build the mechanisms that preserve personal history, commitments and system state across sessions, restarts, model changes and device failures. Make changes traceable and recovery testable.
• Model execution
• Integrate private and external models. Measure their quality, latency, resource requirements and cost. Develop task-specific routing and reliable fallbacks with the Research Engineer.
• Multimodal interaction
• Connect speech, camera input and the shared workspace to MYCL's processing environment. Handle streaming, interruptions, cancellation and uncertain connectivity.
• Private computation and deployment
• Evaluate what should run on the body and when additional private infrastructure is justified. Build reproducible deployments, useful observability and practical update and rollback mechanisms.
Research integration
• Turn promising experiments into maintainable system components. Preserve their evaluation criteria and make it possible to compare new mechanisms against existing behaviour.
What you will do
• Work directly in the codebase, from architecture through implementation and debugging.
• Inspect the existing system and decide what to retain, adapt or replace.
• Build complete paths from human interaction to processing, persistent state and response.
• Establish explicit ownership and versioning for shared state.
• Investigate failures across model, application, network and device boundaries.
• Instrument real interactions so the team can understand delays, errors and behavioural changes.
• Make technical trade-offs visible and support decisions with measurements.
• Introduce engineering practices that support a small team without slowing experimentation.
• Work closely with the founder, Research Engineer, interaction designer and hardware partners.
What you bring
• Staff-level engineering judgement demonstrated through substantial systems you have personally designed, built and operated.
• Strong backend and systems programming skills, with practical Python experience.
• Experience with stateful systems, asynchronous execution and distributed failure modes.
• Hands-on experience integrating and evaluating language or multimodal models.
• Experience with private model inference or the ability to demonstrate comparable depth in compute-intensive systems.
• Strong understanding of data ownership, authentication, access control and secure service boundaries.
• Ability to debug across the full system rather than stopping at a component boundary.
• The judgement to distinguish necessary architecture from complexity that has not earned its place.
• Clear communication and the willingness to challenge assumptions, including your own.
• We care more about the scope and quality of your work than a fixed number of years or a previous job title.