Fractional AI - Software Engineer (SF)

• Experience consistently shipping high visibility or high impact software, with deep care for the craft. We strongly prefer candidates with 4+ years of experience, although we understand it’s only one proxy for impact. Exceptional signals elsewhere (AI evangelism, OSS contributions, founder experience) can substitute. • Experience consistently shipping high visibility or high impact software, with deep care for the craft. • Specific interest in applying software engineering fundamentals to AI systems. You care about balancing frontier model capabilities with good system design. • Specific interest in applying software engineering fundamentals to AI systems. • Comfort talking with senior technical stakeholders. You navigate conversations skillfully, and care about people using what you build. • Comfort talking with senior technical stakeholders. • High ownership mindset. You jump in without instruction, embrace a "no job too big, no job too small" mindset, and want to shape strategy and culture. • High ownership mindset. • Low ego, high integrity. You help others and ask for help. You hold a high bar for honesty–with yourself and your team. • Low ego, high integrity. • Our Engineering Philosophy • We're opinionated about what works in production, and we write about it — from why most eval setups fail by collapsing everything into a single score, to why defaulting to chat interfaces limits AI's impact. • We have a distinct approach to building AI systems: applying standard software engineering discipline to the non-deterministic world of frontier AI. We design systems around testable hypotheses, curate durable data sets, and ensure what we ship keeps working long after we've handed it over. • After shipping 30+ AI products, we have strong opinions on what makes AI products succeed and how to get them into production. We think you'll find it refreshing if you've seen how most companies approach AI. • How Fractional Is Different • A typical engineer here ships two to three products per year and learns from dozens more. You have outsized autonomy on each product — but you won't have a year to polish a single system. The upside is constant time on the frontier of models and tooling, and a muscle for AI product development that's hard to build anywhere else. • Most engineers look back at this as the biggest growth period of their career. But it's possible you won't like it — we recommend using the interview process to hear what our engineers think. • Our Values • Overdeliver: We are writing the playbook on how to create enterprise value with LLMs, and building our reputation as the world’s best applied AI team. • Overdeliver: • Overuse AI: We go out of our way to experiment with the latest tools and share what we learn with our teammates - building a culture at the frontier. • Overuse AI: • Over "engineer" the culture: For every big decision, we ask “would this make Fractional a better or worse place for our team?” • Over "engineer" the culture: • San Francisco, CA • San Francisco, CA • Work Arrangement: 4 days in-person, Fridays remote