Join OpenWhispr as a player-coach lead reporting to the founder. You will own architecture for a product with 150,000+ downloads, leading 3-4 engineers while shipping core code. You’ll solve complex problems across local speech-to-text, latency reduction, and AI agent integrations, ensuring the highest standards for a vocal-first future.
Founding Engineering Lead at OpenWhispr
OpenWhispr is redefining how we interact with AI through an open-source voice interface that’s already been downloaded 150,000 times. As Founding Engineering Lead, you'll act as a player-coach leading a high-velocity team in San Francisco or Chicago. You will own the architecture of complex voice pipelines—balancing local privacy with cloud speed—and help the founder scale the engineering culture. If you have deep product taste, leadership experience, and a passion for shaving latency out of the future of work, this founding-level role offers $160k-$200k plus meaningful equity.
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Location
San Francisco, United States
Compensation
$160k-$200k + Equity
Company
OpenWhispr
Role overview
OpenWhispr is an open-source desktop and mobile dictation application that provides fast, accurate speech-to-text, meeting transcription, and notes. It supports macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and iPad, and offers privacy-first local transcription models as well as cloud processing through user-provided API keys or OpenWhispr Cloud. The product emphasizes private, bot-free transcription, AI chat over meeting data, audio-to-text conversion, and semantic search for notes.
What you will do
- Act as a player-coach, spending the majority of your time writing high-impact code while leading and unblocking a team of 3-4 engineers.
- Architect and maintain complex voice pipelines, optimizing for latency and accuracy across diverse hardware and software environments.
- Define engineering standards for the company, including code review processes, testing frameworks, and high-leverage AI-assisted workstreams.
Who this is a fit for
- Has roughly five years of engineering experience with a track record of leading small teams to ship polished consumer-facing software.
- Possesses deep product craft and design taste, with a bias toward simplifying complex systems rather than adding unnecessary features.
- Demonstrates a proven ability to manage parallel AI-assisted workstreams effectively while maintaining rigorous quality and avoiding AI slop.
Why this role is remarkable
- Lead a product with massive existing traction: 150,000+ downloads and an active open-source community that cares deeply about the product’s evolution.
- Tackle rare technical challenges: Balance high-accuracy cloud inference with private, local speech-to-text and language models running on any machine.
- Founding-level impact: Report directly to the founder, Gabe, and define the engineering culture, hiring practices, and technical roadmap for the company’s next phase.
How Jack & Jill work together
I get to know what you’re great at, then find roles you’d never find yourself.Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.
I recruit from Jack’s network and make the intro when I spot a great match.And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.
Jack gets to know what you're great at and what you want next, then searches 15 million jobs daily and helps you discover roles at companies like this.
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What happens next?
Jack’s an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack’s network.
If your profile’s a match and OpenWhispr wants to meet, Jill will make the intro. In the meantime, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.