Build Ai

Software Engineer, Generalist

San Francisco, California, United States · On-site · FullTime

USD 180,000–300,000/year

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About the role

Description from the employer’s posting. Check the employer’s page for the current version.

  • EmployerBuild Ai
  • LocationSan Francisco, California, United States
  • Work styleOn-site
  • Employment typeFullTime
  • Employer posted
  • Salary (as stated by the employer)USD 180,000 – 300,000 per year

About Build AI

Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.

Job Summary

We’re hiring generalist software engineers who can work across the company. This seat finds the gap, ships in days not weeks, and moves on. One week you might build a data pipeline; the next a hardware integration script, an internal tool, or a customer-facing API. The only constant is a problem that is time-sensitive and business-critical.

Key Responsibilities

Detect the highest-leverage gap that week — ingest, APIs, orchestration, field tools, hardware glue — and ship production-quality code for it

Build backend services and APIs for the data platform and the customer-facing product

Show full description

Write processing and validation pipelines for incoming in-the-wild datasets

Script integrations between collection devices, cloud infrastructure, and software services

Design interfaces and developer workflows that the rest of the company actually uses

Work cross-functionally with research, Shenzhen hardware, and ops without waiting for a spec

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

Strong full-stack skills; fluency in Python and at least one of TypeScript, React, Go, or C++

1–5+ years shipping software end to end, ideally in a 0→1 or startup environment

You ramp quickly in unfamiliar codebases and problem domains

Bias toward action and comfort with incomplete information

Experience shipping where the role was not clearly defined

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

Experience across backend, frontend, data, infra, and scripting

Hardware-adjacent, AI, or large-scale data systems

Prior startup experience during hypergrowth

Infrastructure or DevOps (Linux, containers, cloud)

Benefits

Competitive pay

Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)

Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

Daily lunch and dinner in our office

Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

Unlimited Codex and Claude credits

Travel

How we're different

Build believes in the Bitter Lesson. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.

We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.

Build AI is an equal opportunity employer. We review every application. If you do not meet every bullet, still apply. Questions: research@build.ai

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Advertised salary for this role here

These are advertised ranges, not what people are paid.

  • USD a year, after annualising120,000–465,000 (111 listings, 17 employers)

At a glance

  • Work styleOn-site
  • Employment typeFullTime
  • Salary (as stated by the employer)USD 180,000–300,000 per year
  • Employer posted
  • Added to ROLIVA
  • Last checked

Skills in this posting

Skills ROLIVA found in the employer’s own description above. A mention is not a requirement.

Python React TypeScript C++

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