Founding Engineer

Moonshot builds personal intelligence, the complement to the big labs' general intelligence. Where general models know everything in general and nothing in particular, Moonshot builds a model of one life in particular: your people, plans, promises, and preferences, and what you meant by what you said yesterday. Its vision: "a world where nothing you live is lost and nothing you need arrives too late." The team is a scrappy group of ~19-year-olds (YC-backed) who pivoted here after building and getting acquired for their prior product, deliberately choosing the harder, truer product over vanity metrics.

Moonshot ships today as a proactive personal agent for iPhone, in early access with a waitlist. It's built around two ancient jobs: Notes keeps the little moments that turn out to be the big ones (the dose a doctor mentions, the number a contractor quotes), and Reminders brings the right answer back at the exact moment it counts, unprompted. It follows the shape of your day and surfaces the next thing before you search for it.

Trust is architecture, not a settings page: microphone audio stays on the device, speech is transcribed on-device, and only text/selected context goes to a model when a moment needs understanding, with real deletion controls. Explicitly not a second brain, not a chatbot, not surveillance. The roadmap: prove the loop on iOS today to a wearable that makes capture effortless to health/safety moments where a surfaced answer matters most to on the far horizon, "kept lives." The house line: take your life personally.

Moonshot is hiring its third engineer, the founding engineer. The metaphor the team uses: the founders are in the jungle with a machete cutting the path; they need someone to lay the bricks and go deeper, fine-tuning the changes they push, owning surfaces end to end, and acting as a genuine third brain who thoughtfully pushes back on product direction. It's primarily front-end/product on the iOS app (real design taste is a big plus), but a true builder who problem-solves independently: when transcript quality drops because the phone is in a pocket, they're the person who thinks through mouth-to-phone distance, investigates LiDAR, and comes back with a solution, unprompted.

The bar is initiative under ambiguity above all else. On a team this small the spec often doesn't exist yet, and every recent miss was an initiative problem, not a skill problem, so the process ends in a paid multi-day trial on real work with deliberate gaps in the brief. The two features that anchor everything: Reminders and sectionalized Notes. Ramp: month 1, code in users' hands week one, one surface owned end to end, one thing fixed nobody assigned; month 3, owns one number (the understanding engine's eval score, checkable via the real harness); month 6, has visibly moved signups or retention, makes product calls in their area without a founder in the room, and helps interview the next hire.