Careers at Invariant One open role
Founding
Engineer.
Ship software that helps
hardware leave the ground.
Build the agents that draft, check, and file regulatory submissions. Work directly with the founders. Own what ships.
to get off the ground.
- Location
- San Francisco, CA On-site
- Commitment
- Full time
- Base salary
- $140,000 USD / year
- Equity
- 1.5% Equity in Invariant
01 / The role
Close to the code.
Close to the customer.
You’ll be one of the first engineers at Invariant, owning the agents that draft, check, and file regulatory submissions. Your code ships to customers, with a measured improvement against an eval.
You’ll work directly with both founders, sit in customer working sessions, and make architecture calls that the rest of the team will build on for years. What gets built, and in what order, is partly your decision.
Invariant builds autonomous agents for mission-critical compliance. Our engineers deploy into the customer’s team and own the regulatory process from the first determination through to filing, with the agents doing the work underneath.
A satellite can be built before its approvals are ready. Spectrum, launch, remote sensing, and export requirements each create work that someone has to get right. We’re building the systems that carry that work through.
Why we’re building Invariant02 / What you’ll own
The core system.
And the standard it ships to.
- Design and own the agent architecture that reads a regulatory corpus and drafts filing sections with citations that resolve back to the rule text.
- Set the eval practice for the team: behavioural evals written before the feature, and used to decide whether a change ships.
- Build retrieval over large rule corpora, including chunking, embeddings in pgvector and reranking, and know when each one earns its cost.
- Deploy with customers, run the agents on their data, and turn what you find into fixes between one working session and the next.
- Build and run production Python services: FastAPI, background workers, and streaming progress into a Next.js interface.
- Decide where the agent should stop and hand back to a human, and design the failure modes and refusal behaviour around that.
- Set engineering standards, review code, and help hire the engineers who come after you.
03 / What you bring
You’ve built it.
You’ve had to make it work.
- Several years shipping production software, with at least one system you owned end to end in front of real users.
- You’ve built something with LLMs that survived contact with a paying customer. A demo doesn’t count.
- Strong Python. Comfortable with async, type hints, and a codebase where mypy --strict is a merge gate.
- Enough statistics to tell a real improvement from noise on a small eval set.
- Comfortable in front of a customer, including the meeting where the agent got something wrong.
- Careful with sensitive material.
- Full time, in person in San Francisco.
Nice to have.
Additional experience that would help.
- Time at a satellite operator, launch provider, space agency, or on a university cubesat or rocketry team.
- Background in RF, orbital mechanics, or guidance and control.
- Retrieval work deep enough that you know when reranking helps and when it does nothing.
- Early-stage startup experience, ideally as one of the first few engineers.
- Open source contributions we can read.
04 / The offer
A real stake in what you build.
- Direct work with both founders. There’s no layer between you and the decisions.
- Ownership of the core system, and a say in how the engineering team grows.
- Your name on work that ships to companies putting hardware in orbit.
05 / Apply
Show us what
you’ve built.
Tell us about an agent you shipped and the work it took to make it useful to a customer. We want to understand what you owned, what you learned, and what changed.
We reply to everyone.
Equal opportunity
Invariant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal law, by California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, or by San Francisco ordinance.