Small team · San Francisco

Building a friendly, persuasive agent.

LLMs are trained to follow the human they're talking to. Sela has to do the opposite: read someone's intent and tone and gently steer the conversation toward a goal, well enough to outperform some of the best sales teams in the country. Frontier models aren't built for that. We are.

The Problems Are Genuinely Hard

A quick tour of what you'd actually be working on.

An LLM That Leads, Not Follows

  • Models are optimized to follow the user — we need them to lead
  • Persuade and adapt to a real person without going off-script
  • A research-flavored problem the labs aren’t optimizing for

Real-Time, Non-Deterministic

  • What sounds like one agent is a swarm of specialists handing off mid-call
  • We rewrite the agent’s context, tools, and instructions between turns
  • All inside a few hundred milliseconds, every single turn

Testing Things With No Right Answer

  • Conversations aren’t functions that return true or false
  • Turn-level evals on real moments, plus full end-to-end simulations
  • Simulated callers, LLM-as-judge, and metrics per behavior

Real People, Real Responsibility

  • People tell our agents genuinely personal things
  • Security and privacy are design constraints, not a checkbox
  • Bounded autonomy — unsafe actions simply don’t exist for the agent

Small Team, Big Stakes

A high-density team building directly with the founders out of San Francisco. We're still small, so every hire has an outsized impact on the product and how it's built.

Studied at
Built things at

What We Care About

Everyone's a bar raiser

A high-density team where the bar is high and everyone makes the people around them better.

Helpful by default

How we treat each other matters. Helpfulness and decency are part of the bar, not optional extras.

Ship Fast

Move quickly, get the product into people’s hands, learn, and iterate. Velocity is part of how we work.

Transparency

We’re open about numbers, plans, problems, and tradeoffs. Everyone knows where things stand.

The Practical Stuff

Straightforward, generous where it counts, and built for a team that spends most of its time building together in San Francisco.

Medical

Top-of-market health coverage for you and your dependents.

Dental & Vision

Comprehensive dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents.

401(k) Matching

A top-of-market employer match on your retirement contributions.

Meaningful Equity

Real ownership in what we’re building, granted at an early stage.

Competitive Comp

Salaries benchmarked to senior and staff engineering roles in San Francisco.

Unlimited PTO

Take the time you need to rest and recharge.

Dinner On Us

Dinner on the company any night you’re still at the office in the evening.

Hybrid In Office

Four days a week together in SF, with a flexible remote day on Wednesdays.

Join Us

We're looking for high-agency people who want real ownership and want to help build a large, lasting company. The product is already in market, the technical problems are hard, and the team is still small enough that every person changes what we build.

Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Backend · Real-Time Systems

This is a hands-on backend role with a lot of ownership. You'll work directly with the founders to keep re-thinking and re-designing Sela's backend as we scale from millions of calls a month to many millions a day. The work is real-time, latency-sensitive, and very product-facing: APIs, integrations, call orchestration, and the systems that let our agents respond well in live conversations.

  • Design and build backend services for real-time phone conversations
  • Build public APIs and integrations with the software our customers already use
  • Help re-architect the platform as call volume keeps growing
Python or GoReal-Time at ScaleSan Francisco

Product Manager

AI Product · 0→1 · Hands-On

This is a very hands-on PM role. You'll build and manage the agents directly: what they should say, how they should handle common objections, what actions they should take, and what new use cases we should support. You'll talk to customers constantly, look at where agents are working or breaking, and work directly with the founders to turn those ideas into shipped product.

  • Own agent behavior from idea to live calls
  • Work with customers to find new use cases and product gaps
  • Use data and evals to understand whether the agent is actually getting better
0 → 1Hands-OnSan Francisco

Security & Privacy Engineer

Security · Privacy · Trust

You will be Sela's dedicated owner for security, privacy, and compliance, reporting directly to the CTO. You'll shape this function from the ground up: define and maintain our security and privacy program, own customer security reviews and compliance work, and implement the technical controls needed to protect sensitive customer and consumer data across our API, phone, and SMS systems.

  • Own security and privacy at Sela
  • Implement practical systems for access control, retention, deletion and auditability
  • Help customers, auditors and partners understand how Sela handles sensitive data
Hands-OnFoundational RoleSan Francisco

Come Build With Us

If hard real-time systems, fuzzy evaluation problems, and taking data responsibility seriously sound like your kind of thing, we'd love to hear from you.

Interested in joining us?

Curious What We've Built?

Call our AI agent and hear the product you'd be working on.

SOC 2 Type II Certified
TCPA Compliant
Enterprise-Grade Security