Demo

Founding Engineer

Lilac Labs
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 1/22/2025
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/19/2025

About Lilac Labs:


We are bringing cutting-edge Voice AI into everyday, real-world settings, starting with the drive-thru. There are over 200,000 drive-thru restaurants in America, 60-70% of their sales come through this channel. Fewer than 0.5% currently leverage Voice AI because no-one has cracked the product. We aim to change this—improving accuracy, speed, and the overall guest experience through best-in-class conversational interfaces.


We've raised a $4.2 million seed round from a terrific group of investors that includes Khosla Ventures, Zhu Venture, and Y Combinator to build the best product and win in the space.


You turn into the people you spend time with.


We are a group of builders interested in creating products used by everyday people. We value slope > y-intercept. We value agency and a bias towards action. We are playing to win (or die trying).


About the Role:


As a Founding Engineer, you won’t be a cog in the machine; you’ll be the engine propelling our product forward. You’ll shape core systems, experiment with state-of-the-art AI models, and see your code used directly by real customers every day. Your work will be the voice of our product—offering customers DELIGHTFUL ordering experiences.


Tech Stack:

  • Essentials: NodeJS, TypeScript, Python, NextJS
  • AI: OpenAI, Antropic, open source models, STT, TTS, etc.


What you might work on:

AI/ML: 

  • Experiment with and evaluate the latest models
  • LLM finetune, distillation, and deployment on the edge
  • Train audio classification models.
  • Improve STT models.
  • Evaluation (stt, llm, latency, …, experience)

Core system:

  • Assess the latest tools and frameworks.
  • Build infrastructure to insure 99.9% up-time
  • Create an embedded device that streams audio between mic & speaker and our server on the cloud.

Integrations: Quick service restaurant vertical integrations (Point of Sale, Kitchen Display, drive-thru communication systems).


Responsibilities:


Non-negotiables:

  • Can-Do Attitude: Our only real limit is the laws of physics.
  • In-person, in SF. 20th street in the Mission.
  • Living to work > working to live. This is more than a job.


Engineering:

  • Ownership Mentality: Take full ownership of projects from ideation to deployment and maintenance.
  • Rapid Prototyping: Build new products and features extremely quickly.
  • Scalability and reliability Focus: Build systems that can scale as the company grows and accommodate increasing user demand.
  • Code Quality: Ensure high standards of code quality, testing, and documentation to maintain long-term maintainability and reliability.


Non-Engineering:

  • Product Ownership: Lead new projects.
  • Customer-Centric Approach: Gather feedback directly from end-users and incorporate it into the product.
  • Culture Building: Play a crucial role in defining and fostering the company’s engineering culture.
  • Continuous Learning: Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and tools that could enhance the product and processes.
  • Partnerships: Collaborate with external vendors and partners to integrate cutting-edge solutions into the stack.


Let’s chat if you:

  • Are excited about Voice AI.
  • Believe no technical challenges are too hard to solve.
  • Want to grind with us, staying close to customers to iterate fast and solve their problems.
  • Are fast at 0 to 1, but also thoughtful about how your technical decisions will scale over time.


What we offer:

  • Adventure impact
  • Competitive salary (135k - 200k) Generous equity (0.5% - 1.5%).
  • Health Insurance (including dental & vision).
  • Gym membership


PS:


Humans have been communicating with voice for thousands of years. Over the past year, we’ve seen unprecedented innovation in large language models. It’s now no longer a secret that this new generation of conversational engines will leapfrog all legacy NLP systems. The future will see Voice AI ubiquitous across all industries, taking food orders, making reservations, answering repetitive questions. However, this won’t happen without definite optimists who will push the world towards this reality. As of today, there are many research teams working on model primitives. There are many engineering teams working on the infrastructure layer. During this “gold rush”, people have pre-emptively started selling shovels… but we are the gold miners? We are the pragmatic product builders that will do the gritty work of diffusing technology into traditional industries.

Salary : $135,000 - $200,000

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