Software Engineer, Generalist

ABOUT BUILD AI

Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training 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 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. 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