Lead Product Engineer | 36labs

Role: Lead Product Engineer

Company: 36 Labs

Location: London, on site four days a week. The office is on Baker Street and moves to Primrose Hill within a couple of months. London-based candidates only.

Job Type: Full-time

01About 36 Labs

36 Labs is an applied AI research firm in London. It is working on a gap in today's models: they are weak at creative decisions and at explaining why a decision was made. The team's thesis is that if you solve creativity in LLMs, you have largely solved what captures human attention.

The product is a harness that sits over any frontier model, especially video generation models. It runs ideation, generation and distribution end to end. Content goes out to real audiences, and a data loop improves the harness over time.

The company is profitable and works with Sony, Warner and Universal through bespoke marketing partnerships. Marketing is the proof of concept, not the destination. A B2C offering is due very soon. V3 of the harness is being released internally, and it is a big scope of work.

The team is ten people, with four engineers working under a CTO who is still hands-on in the code. The seed round closes in the next couple of weeks. This is a new stage of growth, not a replacement hire.

02What you are expected to do

• Own the upcoming B2C product end to end, from launch: an AI-native, customer-facing product where UX matters as much as the models behind it.

• Lead product engineering: make product calls with the founders, set the bar for how things get shipped, and help shape the team as it grows.

• Work across the stack on the harness and the products around it. The structure is flat, so engineers work on a bit of everything, depending on what is needed.

• Help build and ship on top of V3 of the harness as it moves from internal release into wider use.

• Take ownership of your pieces of work and move them forward with little hand-holding.

• Work closely with the CTO and the other engineers, and explain your ideas back to the team.

03What you need to succeed

• You have four or more years of hands-on engineering experience, including in the AI-native era.

• You have owned something before, and you can point to it.

• You take the lead. You see what needs doing and start, without waiting to be told.

• You communicate well. You explain your thinking clearly and enjoy discussing it.

• You live in London and are happy to be in the office four days a week.

• You do not need visa sponsorship at this stage. The company cannot sponsor until about February next year. A visa that runs well past February is fine.

• You work with Python, TypeScript and Postgres, and you know LLM and generative model APIs and open-weight models.

• You build and run back-end systems in production, including deployment and operation. This is a strong plus.

• You keep up with the latest stacks, models and engineering practices, and you have side projects beyond your degree or day job.

• A degree in computer science, engineering, maths, stats or similar is a plus, and so is an MSc or PhD. The university matters little, and experience matters more.

• Experience in applied generative media or creative companies, such as Fal, is a plus. What you have built matters more than who you built it for.

• A notice period of one month is fine.

04What you get

• A seed-stage company with a profitable track record since it began operating.

• A strong CV line, and the chance to learn a lot quickly.

• Clear room to grow into a more senior role. The long-term plan is for the CTO to move to strategy and the bigger picture.

• Work on a problem few companies are tackling, with an extremely high ceiling.

• Real clients from day one, including Sony, Warner and Universal.

• A small, flat team of ten, with direct access to the CTO and the founders.

05How to apply

Send your LinkedIn profile or CV to Alexander at the agency. We start with a short screening call. After that, the process runs as follows. First, a first-round interview with Benedict, head of operations, covering your projects, CV and motivation. Second, a technical interview with the CTO of about half an hour. Third, a take-home technical assessment. If the team cannot decide between candidates, there may be a final onsite round where you work on something in front of the team. Strong candidates may go straight to the CTO.

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