Software Engineer (Product)

About Goodfire

Behind our name: Like fire, AI holds the potential for both devastating harm and immense benefit. Just as our ancestors' mastery of fire enabled them to cook food, smelt metals, and launch rockets into space, AI stands as humanity's most profound innovation since that first controlled flame. Our goal is to tame this new fire, enabling a safe transition into a post-AGI world.

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab focused on understanding and intentionally designing advanced AI systems. We believe that advances in interpretability will unlock the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models.

At Goodfire, we're building Neural Programming Interfaces (NPIs) to transform how AI models are developed, just like how Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) transformed software development. NPIs allow developers to reach into the mind of an AI model, extract knowledge the model is thinking about, and design model behavior in precise and targeted ways.

We’re backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, NFDG’s AI Grant, South Park Commons, Work-Bench, and other leading investors.

Working at Goodfire

Our team brings together AI interpretability experts and experienced startup operators from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind, united by the belief that interpretability is essential to advancing AI development.

We're a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco. All roles are in-person, five days a week, at our Telegraph Hill office.

The role:

We are looking for a Software Engineer (Product) to join our team and help build intuitive, flexible user interfaces that simplify the complexity of interpretability techniques, making them widely accessible and intuitive to engineers and researchers.

Core responsibilities:

1. Collaborate with the team to design and implement the user interface and visualization components of our cutting-edge interpretability software
2. Work closely with our research team to translate novel interpretability techniques into practical, user-friendly features
3. Build scalable and robust backend systems to process and serve interpretability data from large language models
4. Integrate open source models and interpretability techniques into our product using PyTorch
5. Own aspects of our deployment and developer experience – driving continuous improvement through the organization
6. Continuously iterate on the product based on feedback from our trusted partners and evolving research in the field

Who you are:

Goodfire is looking for experienced individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We care deeply about building a team who shares our values:

Put mission and team first
All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly
We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative
There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today
We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

If you share our values and have at least two years of relevant experience, we encourage you to apply and join us in shaping the future of how we design AI systems.

What we are looking for:

• At least five years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on building intuitive and scalable products
• Strong proficiency in Python
• Experience with PyTorch or other machine learning libraries
• Strong proficiency in building production-grade backend systems and APIs
• Strong proficiency in modern frontend frameworks, preferably Vue.js
• Passion for AI interpretability and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment
• Contributions to open source projects or research papers in the field of AI and interpretability
• Familiarity with mechanistic interpretability research and concepts
• Familiarity with linear algebra
• Good design instincts

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits. More importantly, you'll have the opportunity to work on groundbreaking technology with a world-class team dedicated to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity.

This role reports to our CTO.