United States onlyAbout Subquadratic
Subquadratic is an AI infrastructure and research company building a new class of LLMs on a proprietary post-transformer architecture. While the major labs focus on incremental transformer improvements, we're pushing foundational change at the model architecture level - enabling large-context, multimodal inference that scales efficiently where transformers can't.
About the Role
Subquadratic is seeking a Principal Full-Stack Engineer to lead development of our core developer platform, console, dashboards, and customer-facing workflows. You’ll own major architectural decisions, build high-quality product surfaces end-to-end, and partner closely with Product, API, and Research teams to bring new speech + LLM capabilities to customers.
What You’ll Do
- Technical Strategy & Architecture: Drive the future of Subquadratic’s customer-facing stack. From frontend architecture to API design best practices, you’ll make high-impact technical decisions that shape how developers interact with our platform.
- Lead Complex AI Integrations: Architect the full-stack systems required to stream real-time audio and LLM tokens to the browser. You will tackle challenges like handling non-deterministic model outputs, managing WebSocket connections at scale, and visualizing voice-to-text latency.
- Drive Developer Experience (DX): Own the "Time to First Hello World." You will build self-serve onboarding flows, interactive API playgrounds, and observability dashboards that allow developers to debug complex LLM/audio workflows in real-time.
- Own backend systems that power auth, usage, billing, and analytics
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner directly with Product and Research leadership to translate experimental AI capabilities into stable, production-ready product features.
- Establish engineering best practices, code quality, and system design standards
- Mentor engineers and guide technical strategy for the product surface area
What You Bring
- Full-Stack Mastery: Deep expertise in TypeScript/React (performance tuning, state management, visualization) and strong backend fluency in Python, Go, or Node.js. You can debug a race condition in the database and a re-render loop in the browser in the same afternoon.
- Platform & API DNA: You have built public-facing APIs, developer consoles, or SDKs. You understand that an API is a product, not just a pipe.
- Proven ability to design scalable architectures and lead complex builds end-to-end
- Systems Expertise: Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—caching strategies (Redis/Memcached), database design (Postgres/DynamoDB), and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP).
- Strong product sense and comfort working closely with PM/design
Bonus
- AI/ML Fluency: You don't need to be a researcher, but you understand the constraints of deploying AI: context windows, token streaming, latency budgets, and cost management.
- Experience building real-time media applications (WebRTC, audio streaming, visualization).
- Background in usage metering, billing, or multi-tenant SaaS architectures
- Startup or 0→1 product experience
Success Looks Like
- A polished, reliable developer platform that customers love
- Faster iteration cycles across research → API → product
- Scalable systems and strong engineering foundations for future growth
