Applied Engineer

**E3 Group** Applied Engineer; $220K–$300K TC (cash + equity); Remote (SF office available)

**About Company** E3 Group (the name stands for Explore, Experiment, Expand) is an applied AI lab building systems for the freight and supply chain industry — fraud detection, high-volume voice and document processing, and carrier/customer communications. Co-founded by Caleb Sirak (MIT; background in data-center chip design and deployment, previously scaled a business to ~$24B in annual volume) and Aqil Naeem (Stanford; working in supply-chain distribution since age 13), E3 raised a $4.5M seed round in January 2026.

Its first product, Shield, is a driver-fraud and identity-verification platform now screening ~5,000 drivers/day (300K+ ingested industry-wide). The team has since shipped Frontline, a high-volume voice-agent product running at roughly 10x lower cost than competitors with better transfer rates, plus workflow-organization and document-ingestion products — with a roadmap to expand across freight AI workflows over the next 5-10 years.

The team is flat: everyone holds the title "member of technical staff," intern to C-suite, and the culture is built around heavy day-to-day use of coding agents, with engineers expected to operate with founder-level ownership across the stack.

**About the Role** E3 splits engineering into two tracks — Applied and Systems/Research. This is the Applied seat: owning the customer-facing layer, turning what the systems/research team builds into shipped product, working directly with customers, and routing what you learn back into the roadmap.

**Responsibilities** - Build and ship customer-facing features across E3's freight-AI products (Shield, Frontline, workflow and document-ingestion tools), from React front end through REST API integration. - Work directly with customers — take their feedback, propose solutions, and react quickly. - Make database and data-architecture decisions with scale in mind, not just the next release. - Build and integrate LLM-powered functionality with a real understanding of latency, cost, and UX tradeoffs of serving LLMs. - Flag systems-side limitations back to the systems/research team and work with them to resolve — this role doesn't operate in a silo. - Use coding agents as the default way of working: parallelize tasks, verify outputs, and spend your judgment on what to build rather than on manual execution.

**Required Skills** A. Hands-on React.js and REST API experience shipping production, customer-facing features. B. Database/data-architecture experience with a demonstrated habit of planning for scale, not just shipping a feature. C. Real experience building products with LLMs as a consumed API — understands latency, cost, and UX tradeoffs of serving LLMs, not just prompting them. D. Heavy, fluent daily use of coding agents — assessed directly in the interview process. E. Shipped to an identifiable user or paying customer. Internal tools and unreleased personal projects do not clear the bar.

**Bonus Skills** - Distributed systems exposure. - Prior forward-deployed or sales-engineering experience working directly with customers.

**Logistical Info** - Location: E3 is HQ'd in San Francisco; in-office is welcome but not required — open to any geography for the right talent. - Compensation: $220K–$300K total comp (cash + equity) for a senior hire; flexible upward for a candidate who can clearly justify it. - Number of openings: Ongoing pipeline (opportunistic, high-bar hiring — no fixed headcount target). - **Other:** Fully async-friendly — no fixed working hours or overlap requirement (E3 runs 24/7 team coverage globally). Strong written/async communication expected: post updates to a shared channel as soon as things happen.

**Ideal Background** - Builders with visible side projects, even small or incomplete ones — E3 weights independent curiosity and self-directed exploration heavily. - Candidates who can precisely explain what they built and why, and name the real bottleneck they solved — not just the scale of what they touched. - Physics or other quantitative-science backgrounds moving into software are a positive pattern E3 has seen work well. - Comp note: Caleb's guidance is ~$240K–$300K TC for a senior hire; anything meaningfully above $300K needs an exceptional, clearly-communicated case — treat $300K as the practical ceiling, not the target. - Process note: submissions go via Slack to Naomi Birman (E3's recruiting ops lead, new to the role, still building out Notion/Slack automations) — expect some early process friction while that beds in.

**Green Flags** - Multiple varied, self-taught technical projects (range and depth over one polished credential). - A "founding engineer" or leadership title at a recognizable company — worth the conversation even if the resume itself is thin on detail. - At least one bullet where you can trace a decision from problem choice, through verification, to a real outcome. Metric density is not the test.

**Red Flags** - "Jargon-maxing" — inflated resume language; can't explain what they actually did or why when asked directly. - Numbers with no baseline, no method, and no way to check them. Internally inconsistent resumes. Concurrent affiliations that cannot all be real. - No relevant AI/agent experience at all. - Comp expectations meaningfully above ~$300K TC without an exceptional case for it. - Big-company IC background with no founder, founding-engineer, or 0-to-1 stretch. Presumptive no unless the submission supplies context that overturns it. - Work that is mostly agent-generated with no evidence the candidate verified it.

- Junior profiles without end-to-end ownership evidence — repeatedly passed on even with strong AI exposure (3 rejections Aug–Sep 2026). Client expects founder-level scope, not just strong skills. **Interview Process** 1. Resume/intro sync (~15 min). 2. Behavioral conversation and interview-process walkthrough (~15 min). 3. Coding round (~1 hr), including a hard requirement to demonstrate fluent coding-agent use. 4. System design round (~1 hr). 5. Final round with co-founder Caleb Sirak.