## **About us**
We're solving AI's hardest problem: alignment.
Encord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ of the world's leading AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, Hitachi, Skydio, AbbVie and Dyna, Walden and Agility Robotics. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to sports and healthcare, we're solving AI's hardest problem: turning complex, real-world data into production-ready intelligent systems.
We're a team of founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and former Olympians, who’ve helped build some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, and alumni of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial. We’ve raised $110M from legendary technology investors, early backers of companies like Databricks, ElevenLabs and Vercel, and we’re growing at an extraordinary pace.
We're looking for exceptional people who want to help build a category-defining company, operating with high urgency and taking real ownership to help shape the future of AI.
## **The role**
We're looking for a Product Engineer to join our Data as a Service team in San Francisco.
LLMs happened because internet scale text already existed. Robotics has no internet to scrape. Nobody has labelled the physical world at scale, and every robot, AV, and surgical system on earth is stuck on exactly that. Surgical teams need thousands of labelled procedures. AV teams are sitting on 100,000 hours of footage they can't use.
Our Data as a Service team exists to unstick all of it. Customers hand us robotics video, LiDAR, medical imaging. We hand back labels. Sounds simple. It isn't: an ML layer routing work between models and expert humans, quality that's measured rather than vibes, one platform serving AI labs on one side and a global annotation workforce on the other.
The teams work is largely greenfield. There's no legacy system to work around and no playbook to follow, because nobody has built this before. What you ship becomes the foundation. The last wave of AI was built on internet data; the next one will be built on data from the physical world, and this team is building the machine that produces it.
## **What you'll do**
- **No ticket queue, no PM between you and the user:** Product engineering here means the real version. You talk to the customer, figure out what matters, make the product call, ship it, and own the outcome: the win and the blast radius.
- **Genuinely unsolved problems:** Design the workflow where human reviewers and AI models hand work back and forth thousands of times an hour, and it feels seamless to the customer. Build one product that flexes across robotics, AV, and healthcare without turning into three products.
- **End-to-end ownership:** From product, design, and architectural decisions, all the way to deployment, monitoring, and measuring impact on users.
- **Autonomy and collaboration:** You will often work autonomously to take charge of your projects and drive your work forward. But as a lean and high trust team, we remain quick to collaborate and support each other with challenging problems together.
## **Who we're looking for**
- **Are a builder:** You know the difference between having a job and building something. You've founded something, been engineer #1, or been the engineer PMs quietly route the ambiguous stuff to.
- **Are experienced:** You've personally built and maintained systems from scratch, and you know what trade-offs are involved in shipping reliable, performant software at speed.
- **Want customers in the room:** Discovery calls, feedback, iteration: you'd rather hear it first-hand than read it in a ticket.
- **Are a team player:** You raise the people around you. You contribute your best work and help others contribute theirs.
## **Why Encord**
- Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
- Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly
- Strong in-person culture: 4 days/week
- Daily team lunches & dinners
- Annual learning & development budget
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- US employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays
- UK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays
- Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe
- Bi-annual company offsites & monthly socials
## **Operating principles**
_ **High agency** _
You see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks.
_ **Build with care & urgency** _
We bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here.
_ **Self-aware & hungry** _
We stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long.
_ **Invent in real time** _
We move toward the ambiguity. We’re pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.
**If you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.**
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
