Role

We are looking for a Founding Member of Technical Staff with a background in Machine Learning with research publications and/or experience at frontier labs. 

Why not “engineer”? We’re not going to make a distinction between engineers and researchers to encourage people to have cross-functional scope and impact. Our CTO has a PhD in reinforcement learning but also writes infrastructure code in Rust.

Today we particularly need help with front-end engineering, but expect everyone to contribute to the entire project over time. The vast majority of your work will be open source. You’ll have an opportunity to continue to master your current skills with the flexibility to learn new ones from scratch.

You can learn more about our technical roadmap and vision here. As a preview, if you joined today, your first major project would likely be an open-source observability dashboard. TensorZero already collects observability data but lacks an user-friendly interface to consume it.

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Team & Culture

We’re a technical team of two based in NYC (in person). As an early contributor, you’ll work closely with us and have a significant impact on the project’s future and vision.

Viraj Mehta (CTO) recently completed his PhD from Carnegie Mellon, with an emphasis on reinforcement learning for LLMs and nuclear fusion, and previously worked in machine learning at KKR and a fintech startup; he holds a BS in math and an MS in computer science from Stanford.

Gabriel Bianconi (CEO) was the chief product officer at Ondo Finance ($10B+ valuation) and previously spent years consulting on machine learning for companies ranging from early-stage tech startups to some of the largest financial firms; he holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from Stanford.

We’ve raised from Bessemer (backed Anthropic), Bedrock (backed OpenAI), and many angels. We’re lucky to have years of runway, giving us flexibility to fully focus on open source for now with an ambitious long-term vision.

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What we offer:

• Competitive compensation — We believe that great talent deserves great compensation (salary, equity, benefits), even at an early-stage startup.
• Open-source contributions — The vast majority of your work will be open source and public.
• Learning and growth opportunities — You’ll join with a background in machine learning and will have the opportunity (& be encouraged) to expand your skill set way beyond that (from Rust to ML).
• Small, technical, in-person team — You’ll work alongside a 100% technical team and help shape our vision, culture, and engineering practices.
• Best-in-class investors — We’re lucky to be backed by leading funds like Bessemer (backed Anthropic), Bedrock (backed OpenAI), and angels in the industry. We have years of runway and a long-term mindset.

We’re looking for:

• Strong technical background — You’ve tackled hard technical problems. You’re comfortable driving large projects from inception to deployment (to start, TensorZero’s observability dashboard).
• Hungry for personal growth — There are no speed limits at TensorZero. You’re excited about learning and contributing across the stack.
• Background in front-end SWE — We’ve started building POCs using Remix and Tailwind, but ultimately we’re not experts in this area (for now!). You’ll complement the team with a strong background and technical leadership (esp. React).
• In-person in NYC — We work in-person five days a week in NYC. We work hard and obsess about the craft – but maintain and encourage a healthy lifestyle with a long-term mindset.

You can find us on Github:

https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero