Founding Engineer, Pendulum
Frontend
£80-100k
1+ day a week in office (Spitalfields, London)
A new kind of language learning company
Job no longer available
A new kind of language learning company
1-20 employees
Job no longer available
£80-100k
1+ day a week in office (Spitalfields, London)
1-20 employees
Company mission
Our mission is to open access to the world's culture through democratising language learning
Role
Who you are
- You are excited about the potential of AI to redefine human-computer interactions and have a desire to build tools that expand our creative possibilities
- Minimum 5 years of professional development experience with TypeScript & React to ship user-facing products as a frontend/full-stack engineer
- Experience with or willingness to learn graphics rendering and canvas libraries and APIs such as HTML5 Canvas API, WebGL, tldraw etc. A central element of our product is collaborative creative canvases
- Strong software engineering experience with the ability to pragmatically think through software design and architecture to ship rapidly while scaling to hundreds of thousands of users
- Proven ability to write well-tested, readable, and performant code that adheres to best-in-class engineering practices
- You thrive in a startup environment. You’re excited to solve user problems through quick iterations, you’re okay with changing priorities, and you’re comfortable with risk
- You are comfortable figuring out how to build things you haven't built before
Desirable
- You have built and shipped creative tools before. We would love to see evidence, either through portfolio projects or on-the-job work, of building beautiful and performant creative software
- Deep understanding of performance optimisation for rendering and/or collaborative workflows, such as efficient rendering, Web Workers, OffscreenCanvas etc.
- Experience with AI/ML models and integrating them into scalable production systems and/or creative projects
- Experience with image generation workflow technologies such as ComfyUI, Fooocus, or Automatic1111
- Experience as an engineer at an early stage startup. We have a track record of shipping products in a fast-paced environment and would love to see the same.
What the job involves
- Design and develop user-friendly interfaces that make using Lightnote as natural as picking up a pencil. You will lead and own our entire frontend engineering efforts.
- Create highly performant collaborative canvases powering the next generation of AI-native creative tooling. We currently use React and tldraw for our canvases.
- Collaborate with our design team to shape how the product works, looks, and feels.
- Ensure the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems across the entire tech stack. You will write clean, maintainable, and efficient code.
Application process
- 1. Apply via Otta
- 2 Video call with CTO
- 3. Short take-home exercise
- 4. Video call with the whole team
- 5. Work with us for a day (fully paid)
- 6. Offer
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Pendulum is an immersive language learning company, developing AI products that redefine the very basics of learning a new language. Pendulum develops its products off the philosophy that to truly learn a language, one must experience the culture, differentiating it from the gamified learning of Duolingo and the traditional focus of education on grammar and sentence memorising.
Its products leverage conversational voice AI and autonomous LLM agents to create evolving digital landscapes that are fluid to the customer's fluency level. Essentially, customers are immersed in open-ended scenarios that are actively shaped by their conversations, thus replicating the experience of speaking to someone in a foreign language
Founded by a small team emerging from the South Park Commons Founder Fellowship, Pendulum has garnered support from notable investors, including Shine Capital and Mercuri, and early backers from platforms like Notion, Vimeo, and Patreon. These endorsements reflect confidence in Pendulum's approach to learning new languages. The team behind Pendulum brings extensive experience in AI product development, having previously built solutions at Spotify, led product and strategy initiatives at Google, and conducted research on generative media and natural language processes at Oxford and Imperial College. With this extensive background, Pendulum is ready to transform the way we learn new languages.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (1 round)
Jun 2024
$3.8m
Seed
Total funding: $3.8m
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
William Usdin
(Co-Founder)Previously worked at Google through several roles, most recently as Head of Strategy and Operations, EMEA. Also founded Woven Science and acted as their Chief Operating Officer.
Zo Ahmed
(Co-Founder)Ex-Spotify, most recently as their youngest ML Engineering Lead. Built out Spotify's podcast recommendation engine from scratch. Previously researched deep learning at Oxford University.
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