Software Engineer, Generalist
- San Francisco, United States
Posted 4 days ago
About the role
About Build AI
Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We co-design hardware, collection, infrastructure, and research to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.
Job Summary
We’re hiring generalist software engineers who can work across the company. This seat finds the gap, ships in days not weeks, and moves on. One week you might build a data pipeline; the next a hardware integration script, an internal tool, or a customer-facing API. The only constant is a problem that is time-sensitive and business-critical.
Key Responsibilities
Detect the highest-leverage gap that week — ingest, APIs, orchestration, field tools, hardware glue — and ship production-quality code for it
Build backend services and APIs for the data platform and the customer-facing product
Write processing and validation pipelines for incoming in-the-wild datasets
Script integrations between collection devices, cloud infrastructure, and software services
Design interfaces and developer workflows that the rest of the company actually uses
Work cross-functionally with research, Shenzhen hardware, and ops without waiting for a spec
You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)
Strong full-stack skills; fluency in Python and at least one of TypeScript, React, Go, or C++
1–5+ years shipping software end to end, ideally in a 0 1 or startup environment
You ramp quickly in unfamiliar codebases and problem domains
Bias toward action and comfort with incomplete information
Experience shipping where the role was not clearly defined
Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)
Experience across backend, frontend, data, infra, and scripting
Hardware-adjacent, AI, or large-scale data systems
Prior startup experience during hypergrowth
Infrastructure or DevOps (Linux, containers, cloud)
Benefits
Competitive pay
Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office
Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)
Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
Daily lunch and dinner in our office
Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
Unlimited Codex and Claude credits
Travel
How we're different
Build believes in the Bitter Lesson. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.
We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.
Build AI is an equal opportunity employer. We review every application. If you do not meet every bullet, still apply. Questions: research@build.ai
Compensation Range: $180K - $300K