---
title: 'Applied AI Engineer at Sauna'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-sauna-san-francisco-k7rxpcqws9x4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Applied AI Engineer at Sauna

- **Company:** Sauna
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sauna.ai/8b929ad7-204f-4584-bfa5-a356d08fab87

## Job description

## ⚠️ PLEASE READ FIRST

- This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
- You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
- We require US work authorisation, but are open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.

## ABOUT SAUNA BY WORDWARE

Every tool you use was built as an island, so you became the glue between them: a name from Gmail into the CRM, a time from the CRM into Calendly, a note from Calendly into a doc. AI showed up and mostly became an eleventh window to paste into.

Sauna is a hybrid of AI and software standing on one shared brain. It holds your context and hands you real software built on top of it, so an ordinary Calendly becomes one that writes the invite itself and knows which of your busy hours bend, and for whom. Software for the path you repeat, AI for the edge that never repeats.

Wordware is the team behind it, 15 people backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator with a $30M seed, the largest in YC's history. We build from an office in the Presidio, fifty metres from Crissy Field beach, and we work absurdly hard because we can see and feel the outcome every day.

## ABOUT THE ROLE:

As an Applied AI Engineer, you’ll be responsible for building, refining, and scaling the agent systems inside Sauna, from architecture to evals to deployment.

We care about what works in production: fast response times, predictable behavior, traceability, and uptime.

You’ll work across infra, frontend, and product to make sure the agents people build inside Wordware actually work.

A FEW EXAMPLES OF WHAT YOU MIGHT WORK ON:

- Implement multi-step, tool-using agents that hit real APIs and handle retries, auth, timeouts, and edge cases.
- Design agent memory systems that persist relevant state across runs, e.g. memory migrations, context organization, and orchestration state.
- Create agents that proactively do work and send you reminders.
- Own and evolve our eval framework: both automated checks and human-in-the-loop scoring.
- Plus whatever else you see fit.

## WHO YOU ARE

## MINIMUM

- 3+ years of engineering experience, including time shipping production software.
- You've built and deployed agent-like systems: multi-step LLM pipelines, tool-using bots, scripted assistants, or similar.
- Hands-on experience with:
- Agent orchestration and memory management (e.g. memory migrations, state organization).
- Tool use and orchestration (e.g. calling real APIs, using plugins, auth flows)
- Evaluation: success metrics, regression testing, and improving agent behavior over time
- You write production-grade code and can work across systems without needing a spec.
- You'd rather ship than polish forever.

## BONUS (NOT REQUIRED)

- Shipped agents that live in the wild, used by customers, not just internal demos.
- Familiarity with LLM ops, tracing, observability, and failure handling.
- You've been a founder or early engineer, and it shows in the bar you hold your own work to.

Compensation & Benefits:

Base salary: $180K–$240K + meaningful early-stage equity + health, dental, 401(k), considerable PTO, gym budget, lunch.

## THE PROCESS

We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks.

1. Application: Submit your resume and answer a few quick questions.
2. 15-min intro call: Quick check to align on location, motivation, and logistics. If it’s a go, we move fast from here.
3. System design interview (1 hour): We dig into how you think about agent design: architecture, tradeoffs, and your experience building AI harnesses and agent systems.
4. Technical interview (optional follow-up): A coding round testing hands-on engineering fluency and speed, only if we need a closer look.
5. Final conversation: Answer any questions and scope out the work trial.
6. Work trial: Paid, in-person. Typically 5 days, though we're flexible on timing depending on the role. You’ll work on something meaningful with us.

## About Sauna

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sauna is building a multiplayer AI agent that learns how you and your team work, remembers everything that matters, and acts on your behalf across thousands of connected tools.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, USA
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Not publicly available (company is described as being built by "ex-YC founders")

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Software, Productivity
- Target customers: B2B, teams and knowledge workers
- Mission or purpose statement: To create an AI agent that works as a teammate—running in the background, learning context across sessions, and getting work done even when users are offline.

## Products & Services
- **[Sauna AI Agent]**: A cloud-based AI agent that connects to over 3,000 tools and apps (Linear, GitHub, Notion, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, HubSpot, Stripe, etc.). It drafts messages, tracks what matters, files tickets, and delivers briefings. It is "multiplayer"—teammates share a Sauna's context and memory, and individual agents can communicate with each other. Available on web app, iOS, iMessage, Slack, and email.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $30M (largest seed round in YC history)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator, Spark Capital
- **Growth Signals**: Named "Makers of the #1 Product of All Time on Product Hunt"; launched publicly on April 29, 2025; currently 18 employees; shipping to first paying users; described as building "Cursor for knowledge work"

## Competitive Advantages
- **Multiplayer AI**: Unlike single-user AI assistants, Sauna allows entire teams to share context and memory, and individual agents can communicate peer-to-peer.
- **Always-on Cloud Agent**: Runs 24/7 in the cloud, working even when the user is offline—drafting, tracking, filing, and briefing autonomously.
- **Massive Tool Integration**: Connects to over 3,000 tools and apps, with custom MCP connector support.
- **Record Seed Round**: The largest seed round in YC history signals strong investor confidence and ample runway.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities include scaling the agent runtime to handle 1000x current load, building out sandbox infrastructure for secure code execution, and expanding the product to serve more team workflows. The company is hiring heavily across engineering, product, and growth roles to accelerate product-market fit.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early-stage startup (18 people) with a "ship fast" ethos—one-week sprints, weekly demos, and features going from sketch to launch in days. The company uses its own product daily.
- **Work Policy**: Fully in-office, five days a week at the Presidio in San Francisco. Relocation required for non-local candidates.
- **Compensation**: Competitive base salary ($180K–$240K for Senior Full Stack Engineer), meaningful early-stage equity, health/dental, 401(k), considerable PTO, gym budget, and lunch provided.
- **Engineering Culture**: Work directly with the CTO; own infrastructure decisions that determine system reliability at scale; build real-time streaming, task queues, and multi-model LLM routing.
- **Hiring Process**: Simple and fast—exceptional candidates can go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks. Includes a paid in-person work trial (a few days to two weeks).

## Sources
1. [sauna.ai](https://www.sauna.ai/)
2. [builtin.com - Sauna Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/sauna/jobs)
3. [ainative.careers - Product Manager at Sauna](https://ainative.careers/jobs/sauna-product-manager)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com - Growth @ Sauna](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sauna.ai/56f92234-3ad1-4eaf-8f95-c53fa15af0a0)
5. [builtin.com - Senior Full Stack Engineer (Back-End)](https://builtin.com/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-back-end/9906576)

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