Member of Technical Staff – Product Engineering

Hone builds AI that owns outcomes, not tasks: agentic systems that work towards goals over weeks and months, deploy themselves, and improve over time.

ABOUT HONE

Models keep getting smarter, but outside of coding most organizations can't absorb that intelligence, and the gap between model capability and the value derived from it keeps widening. The reasons are many, from human incentives to org design, but at the core we think it's a technology problem. Hone builds engines: AI systems that you hand a goal, like "keep the recruiting pipeline healthy." An engine builds itself, maintains its own agents and code, pulls in people when it needs judgment, and learns from every correction.

In October 2026, we announced a $60M seed round https://hone.com/blog/introducing-engines/ from Benchmark and Index Ventures.

- Half our team are former founders: They’ve built companies, shipped products, and chosen Hone as the place to build next. The rest of us come from Cognition, Mercor, Ramp, Jane Street, Decagon, Brex and Harvey

- Our customers are building with AI themselves: Cognition, Modal and Lucanet already use Hone, with customer perspectives featured on our website https://hone.com/

- Our founders have built from research to scale: They researched agents at Stanford, built the core of Devin at Cognition, led enterprise engineering at Mercor, built internal AI platforms, and founded companies that reached over one million users

- We measure our work by economic impact: Engines are deployed across revenue, procurement, risk, product and operations, and we judge them by the results they create, not benchmark scores

- Our values shape how we work: Own the Outcome, Set the Standard, Win with Class, and Commit to the Racing Line. Read more on our careers page https://hone.com/careers/

- Read more: Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-08/former-openai-cognition-staffers-want-ai-to-help-run-a-business, Index Ventures’ investment thesis https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/ai-that-owns-business-outcomes-our-investment-in-hone/, and our launch announcement https://hone.com/blog/introducing-engines/

THE ROLE

Engines are persistent and multiplayer: they run for weeks or months across a company's systems, work towards outcomes autonomously, and pull in people when they need judgment. Most of the interaction patterns for this kind of AI don't exist yet. You'll own the surfaces where people set up, supervise and calibrate engines, end to end from schema to UI: onboarding, real-time activity, review and approvals, routines, memory, permissions, and the tools where people already work.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

- Engine creation, onboarding and calibration, from first goal to production.

- Interfaces that make a long-running agent swarm easy to understand: what it's doing, why, and what it plans to try next.

- Task inbox, approvals and review, and the loop that turns each correction into lasting changes in engine behavior.

- Frontier interfaces and generative UI: give engines the tools to build custom interfaces that elicit user feedback and judgment in context.

- Multiplayer interaction with one persistent engine: shared and personal memory, conflicting feedback, per-person permissions.

- Engine surfaces in chat and email.

REQUIREMENTS

- 2+ years of engineering experience, or equivalent depth from open source or your own projects

- Time at a fast-growing startup

- You've built products from scratch and shipped them to real users

- You've owned polished features end to end, from backend to UI

- Strong product and design judgment: what to cut, what to polish, when to ship

- Strong full-stack fundamentals: Python, TypeScript, React, Postgres, real-time interfaces, debugging unfamiliar code

- You use coding agents every day and still understand every line you ship

- You build and tinker for fun because you genuinely care about how products are made and used

NICE TO HAVE

- You've founded a company or shipped agent products

- You work where design and engineering overlap: you prototype in code and sweat spacing, motion and copy

HOW WE HIRE

1. Intro with a co-founder.

2. Technical screen.

3. Product engineering deep dive.

4. Two-day work trial in San Francisco.

5. References.

6. Offer.

LOGISTICS

- Location: San Francisco, in person, Sunday to Friday.

- Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

- Visa: We sponsor visas and support you through the immigration process.

- Benefits: Health and dental insurance, maternity and parental support, and relocation support.