Founding AI Product Engineer (Lead)

Today's enterprise software is better than ever, but most organizations still run on conversations rather than systems.

Critical work lives across Slack, email, meetings, documents, and people's heads. Existing tools depend on humans to manually update records, push projects forward, and make sure important work doesn't fall through the cracks.

We believe AI should do more.

Thorin is building proactive, long-horizon AI agents that continuously understand what is happening across an organization and help teams execute over weeks, months, and years. Rather than waiting for prompts, Thorin develops a living understanding of how a business actually operates.

Born out of 8VC's Build program and backed by one of Silicon Valley's strongest venture ecosystems, Thorin is building the operating system for the AI-native enterprise.

Build agents, retrieval, and evaluations for real customer workflows. Own features from the initial product decision through implementation and production.

• Own major technical initiatives from ambiguous customer/product problem to architecture, implementation, iteration, and production quality.

• Build AI-native product systems involving LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, enterprise context, and workflow automation.

• Lead by building: set technical direction, make tradeoffs explicit, review work, unblock others, and raise the quality of a small engineering pod.

• Turn product and customer signal into clear technical plans without waiting for perfect requirements.

• Staff-level engineering judgment, whether or not your current title says Staff.

• Strong hands-on coding ability and architectural taste across production systems, AI applications, infrastructure, agents, or product engineering.

• High slope: you have progressed quickly, taken on harder problems, and become someone others trust with ambiguous technical work.

• AI-native instincts: you actively use and build with AI systems and understand where they work, fail, and create new product possibilities.

• Product judgment: you connect technical choices to user value, customer deployment, product credibility, and business priorities.

• Low ego, high standards, and comfort operating before the roadmap is obvious.

• Own and ship meaningful production work.

• Create clarity around a major technical lane or pod.

• Reduce a roadmap or execution bottleneck without adding management overhead.

• Competitive compensation and meaningful early equity.

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.

• Daily meal support while working with the team.

• Unlimited access to frontier AI coding tools.

• Direct exposure to founders, investors, design partners, and early customers.

This is an in-person role based in San Francisco. At this stage, we believe the best work happens through high-bandwidth collaboration, fast feedback loops, and shared context with the team.

The expected base salary range for this role is $250,000–$350,000, plus equity and benefits. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, skill level, and scope.