Founding Engineer

About SkyBuds

SkyBuds makes screen-free AI plush friends for curious kids ages 3 to 10. Ash, Pearl and Sprout each have their own voice and personality: they answer big questions, tell stories that go wherever a child’s imagination takes them, play games and help kids become smarter and more mature.

We believe in an extremely social AI world, where people shift from using AI as a tool to forming real relationships with their AI: in-home robots, on their watch, phone, everywhere.

There are 2B+ children in the world, and we are building the first safe AI entry point for them in a form factor they love: a toy.

The role

You’ll be one of our first engineers and own the backend that powers every conversation. That means the voice AI, the data behind our kid-speech models, and the systems that keep kids safe. We build with AI coding agents, so you’ll also set the structure they build inside. We care about a system that is clean, scalable and fast.

What you’ll do

• Build and scale our realtime voice backend so the toys answer instantly
• Run speech and LLM models in production
• Build the data and evals pipeline that makes our models better every week
• Own the systems that keep kids safe
• Set the patterns that let AI agents and future hires ship fast

You might be a fit if you

• Have shipped and scaled production backends (TypeScript or Python, Postgres)
• Have worked on realtime or AI systems
• Use AI coding agents every day
• Love moving fast and owning things end to end

Bonus: voice AI, connected hardware or kids’ products

Why SkyBuds

• Small team in NYC, and your work ships to families within days
• Real ownership from day one
• $100k to $150k base + founding equity

How to apply

Send your resume and a short note about something you built that you’re proud of.