This role is based in Seattle, Washington (open to considering San Francisco-based candidates)

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. We're building toward a world where humans and AI coworkers work as one team — and increasingly, part of that world is physical hardware. The Ox Dot is our first device: a small, always-there presence that gives the hivemind a body in the room. It's real, it's shipping, it's the hardest and most unforgiving surface we build on — and it's one of several hardware bets we're weighing for what comes next.

This is a full-stack role whose center of gravity is our hardware — the first hire dedicated to it. A large portion of your time is on the Dot today; the rest is genuinely full-stack — the cloud services the device talks to, the app and web experiences people actually use, and everything in between, from firmware in the field to the pixels on the screen. And we move fast: in a few months the Dot may not be the thing we're building at all, so you flex with it — bringing up a device from another manufacturer, or picking up a different corner of the stack entirely, without missing a beat.

There's no trail yet. Pioneering and breaking trails is one of our company's core values. You're one of the first ten people cutting it.

Location — Seattle, In Person

This job is done in person, in Seattle, five days a week. Not remote. Not hybrid. Not "in person to start." At the speed we're moving, being in the same room is essential, and we strongly believe that magic happens when people are in the flow together working on ambitious problems. If you're looking for a remote or remote-friendly role, please don't apply to this one — we'd rather you not spend the time.

Two narrow situations we'll still talk to you about. Both are in person; neither is remote work:

• You'd be relocating to Seattle. For select Staff/Principal-level candidates, we may help with some basic relocation costs. You'd be here, in the office, like everyone else.
• You're in the Bay Area. Through the end of 2026, we may consider a San Francisco–based candidate who can be in Seattle, in person, at least two weeks a month.

That's the whole list. Outside of those two, this role requires living in the Seattle area and working alongside the team on site.

What You'll Actually Ship

Everyone here has the agency to figure out what the product needs and go make it happen — junior or senior, nobody waits for a spec. Your center of gravity is the hardware, but the job runs the whole loop around it. Pick a week at random and you might be:

• Driving firmware and hardware on the Ox Dot — boot, memory, the audio pipeline, connectivity — the whole stack that has to Just Work in someone's home or office.
• Building the development harness — the tooling that lets an AI coworker drive a real device end-to-end, and the APIs that make it fully operable that way.
• Standing up 24×7 automated hardware testing — a small fleet of real devices under continuous, unattended test, with Behavior-Driven Development scenarios as the source of truth for "does the device actually do the thing," on silicon, not just in a simulator.
• Shipping firmware safely to devices already in customers' hands: staged rollout, health-gated updates, and A/B rollback so a bad update never bricks a device. At millions of devices in the field, the update pipeline is the product.
• Writing the cloud services the device talks to and the app and web experiences people actually use — the device is only half the product — plus the memory and AI-coworker systems, auth, and real-time streaming underneath, kept honest against our digital twins.
• Building the pipeline that turns a bare board into a customer-ready unit: provisioning, first-boot, pairing and auth, everything that has to be right before a device leaves for a customer.
• Working with suppliers on the supply chain, and shaping the outer shell and accessories — the parts a customer actually touches.
• Bringing a candidate device home, tearing it down, and telling us what's real as we weigh what to build next.

The Frontier You'd Be Standing On

In just a few months on the Dot we've built things most hardware teams don't have, because we came at it AI-first. Building the next generation of them is the job — not a side quest:

• APIs that make a physical device fully operable by an AI coworker. It can flash the device, drive the touchscreen — tap, hold, swipe — pull a screenshot of the live screen, tail logs, inject a known audio file as the microphone, and assert on real on-device state. End to end, no human hands on the board.
• AI coworkers that look at the screen and reason about what to test. One captures a screenshot, reasons about what's actually rendered, decides the next thing worth exercising, and walks the UI like a person would — then cross-checks what it saw against ground-truth device state, so "the screen looks right" is never confused with "the device did the thing."
• Digital twins of everything the device talks to. The Dot casts to TVs across four protocols, streams audio to the cloud, and talks to our API. We built faithful twins of all of it — conformance oracles that grade every message — so an AI coworker can prove the full end-to-end path without a single real TV, relay, or cloud call.
• A diagnostic harness that bisects by dependency layer, not by git history. Boot-time test sockets slice a silent hardware bug down the stack (mic → audio → wifi → net → auth) and converge in minutes on problems that used to eat days.
• Micro-optimization as a daily sport. The entire product — audio pipeline, TLS, an animated round UI, WiFi, over-the-air updates with A/B rollback — lives in 512 KB of internal SRAM and 8 MB of PSRAM, where a single TLS handshake alone wants ~40 KB contiguous. Packing a rich device into that envelope, and keeping it there change after change, is real, satisfying craft.

Widening that frontier is the job.

What We're Looking For

We're not optimizing for pedigree. We're looking for entrepreneurial builders with systems-first thinking, AI chops, real hardware experience, and product judgment. The rest is just evidence.

• AI-pilled, for real. Agentic coding — Claude Code, Codex, whichever tool — is already your daily practice, not something you tried once. We won't teach you this on the job; the work trial assumes you show up fluent.
• You build the system that builds the code. The leverage is in the harnesses, loops, and specs that produce the code while you bring the judgment. A 2026 AI-native engineer spends less time reading every line and more time directing the system that writes it. If watching an AI coworker write your code makes you curious rather than anxious, you'll feel right at home.
• You've built on real hardware. A shipped consumer product, or the firmware for a device you hacked together on your bench — either counts. What matters is you've built some complex code that runs on a physical thing, not the logo on the box.
• Tinkerer and hardware hacker. You reach for a logic analyzer and a soldering iron, and you think outside the box about how to make a device controllable, observable, and abusable by automation.
• Curious sideways, not just deep. You've gone down a rabbit hole on something outside your lane — how a database index works, why a mic distorts at certain frequencies, what makes an animation feel expensive — because you wanted to know. Borrowing an idea from one domain and slamming it into another is most of what "full-stack" means here.
• You finish, and you ship. A hard problem is fun to poke at; the job is turning that into something running in production. If shipping is the part you rush past, we're not a match.
• You take the unproven path on purpose, sometimes. Calculated risk, not recklessness — someone who'd rather build the new thing than maintain the safe one.
• You have agency and drive. You see what the product needs and go make it happen — nobody hands you a spec. That's the bar for everyone here, junior or senior.
• Bonus, not required: you've led before. Directing a fleet of AI coworkers through a hard problem draws on the same muscle as directing a team through one: decompose clearly, delegate with real intent, review what comes back, and know exactly when to step in and do it yourself.

You Might Not Be a Fit If

We'll say this plainly, because it's the crux of the role — this job assumes an AI-native way of working. You may not be a fit if:

• Your instinct is to hand-drive every test on the bench yourself, and the idea of an AI coworker doing it makes you uneasy.
• You consider tooling, harnesses, and test infrastructure "not real engineering" or someone else's job.
• AI coding tools are something you've tried, not something you live in.

None of that is a knock on great engineers. It's just not this job.

How We Hire

We don't run technical interviews. No whiteboard algorithms, no four-hour system-design rituals. Clear an initial assessment and we'll invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days, full-time, in person in Seattle, building something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. The trial will be on terms that are mutually agreed upon. Most of what either side needs to know about fit shows up in those few days, not in a loop of hypotheticals.

Before applying, please learn more about our work trials.

Ajit, our CEO, wrote up why we replaced interviews with this, including the uncomfortable math behind it: Read the post →

SageOx Today

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub → Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly) — people who've built this kind of infrastructure, and scaled through an acquisition or two, before. We're small on purpose, hiring our first ten. More about the team →

Compensation

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit. That's what the trial is for.

Apply

There's no shortage of comfortable places to write software right now. This is not one of them, and that's the point. Apply with the button below — include your GitHub username, we'll actually look.

We're not working with recruiters or recruiting agencies/consultants at this time — direct applications only, please.