Founding Engineer, Pendulum
AI engineering
£90-130k
Plus sizable equity
1-5 days a week in office
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
£90-130k
Plus sizable equity
1-5 days a week in office
1-20 employees
Company mission
Our mission is to open access to the world's culture through democratising language learning
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong expertise in Python. Deep experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks is a must.
- Experience building and scaling LLM-powered applications, particularly those involving visual AI, agentic workflows, or voice-based AI interactions.
- Understanding of asynchronous processing and distributed task execution.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and serverless deployments, preferably on platforms like Modal.
- 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.
- You can ship at high velocity without compromising on quality and are comfortable figuring out how to build things you haven't built before.
Desirable
- Experience working with WebRTC or real-time media streaming technologies is desirable.
- Experience building consumer AI products, preferably leveraging voice or visual AI.
What the job involves
- As an AI engineer at at Pendulum, you will own and scale the backend systems that power our voice-first, AI-driven language learning experience. Your role will be pivotal in developing the infrastructure that enables real-time, multimodal AI interactions. Examples of recent AI engineering work we have shipped include: giving our core conversational LLM agentic abilities to autonomously generate images based on conversational context; implementing memory in our LLM system to make a more personalised language companion, and creating an agentic system to create a ‘Daily Review’ feature that draws from a user’s entire conversational history.
- Design and optimise systems that orchestrate multiple LLMs, voice AI components (TTS, STT), and visual AI to power real-time conversational language learning backed by voice interactions and visual support. This will involve handling streaming responses, profiling and optimising components of chained AI systems, memory management, and agentic workflows.
- Own and scale our FastAPI-based backend, ensuring performance and reliability as we grow to hundreds of thousands of users
- Develop and scale WebRTC-powered voice interactions, leveraging and modifying open-source frameworks like Pipecat to fit our use cases
- Ensure a smooth developer experience by writing and maintaining clean, well-documented code supported by sensible system design choices
Application process
- 30 min intro call with one of the founders
- 1 hour technical interview
- 1 hour call with whole team
- Work with us for a day (fully paid)
- Join the team 💫
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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