Founding Engineer

About Lilac Labs

At Lilac Labs, we’re build the next big voice AI company. Our mission is to create delightful experience for our customers and our customer’s customer. Great products start with focus and craft, and we’re starting with the restaurant vertical. We've recently raised $4.2M from YC, Khosla Ventures, and Zhu Ventures, and we’re hiring for a founding engineer to join us at the ground floor. If you’re a builder at heart — this is for you.

About the role

As a Founding Engineer, you have an outsized impact. Together with the founding team, you’ll build the foundations of our product. You’ll be part of the decision making process every step of the way. We care about your product opinions.

You’ll be working with:

• Tony Kam (Co-founder / CEO): EECS @ UC Berkeley. Previously: UI + System at Tesla, Automation at Intel, Data at CloudMinds. To get our first customer, Tony camped our at the restaurant and r and literally flipped burgers.
• Shelden Shi (Co-founder / CTO): CS + CogSci @ UC Berkeley. Previously: Founding engineer @ Fintech with $1B AUM. Shelden was also a semi-pro poker player.

You’ll will be working on:

Tech Stack: NodeJS, NextJS, TypeScript, Python, C++, MongoDB (or you can change our mind here)

Core Technologies: ASR, VAD, LLMs, Speech Synthesis (TTS), S3, EC2,

Understand enough to be dangerous : Distributed Systems, Networking, Embedded Systems, Streaming Algorithms, Audio Processing, Deep Learning, Fine-tuning and Model Distillation.

Core Priorities of this year: Product must work and pass the threshold of “is it useful in the field” — and beyond that… “is it delightful for the end customer.”

Types of problems you may work on include: designing and implementing the scalable backend for our product, such that the AI order taker can reliably handle concurrent requests in real-time.

What it’s like working here:

We value an idea meritocracy: in practice, this is open, transparent feedback. We want to work with people who push and challenge each other to be better. For this to happen, we need a high trust culture where we can disagree and commit. We think like owners. We care a lot and pride ourselves with quality and craft of our work. We work in person at least 5 days a week at our HQ in SF. Our office is in the Mission, around 20th and Harrison. We care about impact, but for a small team, face time matters too! And that’s where we think the best collaboration happens.

We believe you would be a successful Founding Engineer at Lilac if:

• You demonstrate strong technical proficiency in our core technologies across the stack and can quickly adapt to new tools and frameworks as needed.
• You excel at problem-solving, approaching complex technical challenges with creativity and resourcefulness, and can thrive in our fast-paced, ever-evolving startup environment.
• You embody a “can-do” attitude, approaching even the most audacious technical challenges with unwavering conviction in your ability to solve them.
• You possess a keen product sense and customer customer-centric mindset, consistently making decisions that enhances the customer experience and align with our business goals.
• You’re an effective communicator and collaborator, able to work seamlessly with cross-functional teams, contribute meaningfully to technical discussions, and clearly articulate your ideas and solutions.