---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff - Development Experience at Unconventional, Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-development-experience-unconventional-inc-mountain-sb1ydxb6g5rk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Member of Technical Staff - Development Experience at Unconventional, Inc.

- **Company:** Unconventional, Inc.
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA / Seattle, WA
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-07-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://unconv.ai/careers/?gh_jid=4327321009

## Job description

## About Unconventional

Since 2022, AI has entered the mainstream, reshaping entire industries from education and software development to fundamental consumer behaviors. This revolution has created an unprecedented demand for computation - a demand that is now fundamentally limited by energy, not just in the datacenter, but at a global scale.

At Unconventional, our mission is to solve this. We are rethinking computing from the ground up to build a new foundation for AI that is 1000x more efficient. We're doing this by exploiting the rich physics of semiconductors, mapping neural networks directly to the device physics rather than relying on layers of inefficient abstraction.

## The Role

As a Member of Technical Staff, Development Experience, you are the operational backbone of Unconventional AI's "extreme co-design" workflow. Unlike a traditional platform engineering role, your internal customers are a wildly multi-disciplinary mix of AI researchers, integrated-circuit experts, and silicon engineers building the future of physics-based compute. You will own the standardized development environments, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code that allow this diverse team to rapidly iterate on complex simulations, ML training, and hardware verification without friction.

While our heavy GPU compute clusters are managed by a dedicated infrastructure pod, you will own the overarching developer experience and establishing robust observability. Crucially, you will also pioneer our "coding/dev agent knowledge management" initiatives: designing bespoke systems that extract and persist personal developer context across hosts and agents to create a highly augmented, agent-assisted engineering environment.

## Responsibilities

- Extreme Co-Design Environments: Build, standardize, and maintain development and research environments tailored for a highly diverse team spanning software, physics, and silicon engineering.
- Agentic Dev Knowledge Management: Architect 0-to-1 systems for personal developer knowledge extraction and cross-host persistence, laying the groundwork for highly context-aware, AI-assisted coding workflows.
- Core DevEx & Platform Support: Own CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and observability across our engineering stack.
- Engineering Standardization: Promote and enforce best engineering practices across multi-disciplinary pods. Ensure high velocity and reliability without stifling research agility

## Minimum Qualifications

- Education: BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience: 5+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or Developer Experience (DevEx).
- Programming & Scripting: Strong programming proficiency in Python, coupled with advanced shell scripting (Bash, etc.) for robust automation.
- Infrastructure & Orchestration: Deep expertise in Linux/Unix environments. Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker) and container orchestration, specifically Kubernetes (K8s).
- DevOps & Cloud: Proven track record of designing and managing CI/CD pipelines and deploying to major cloud environments (OCI, AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Data Fundamentals: Solid understanding of database architectures and storage solutions to support stateful applications.
- Agentic Workflow: Experience with or strong interest in "agentic code development" (e.g., utilizing AI coding assistants, automating engineering workflows with AI).

## Preferred Qualifications

- Agentic Orchestration: Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) and experience building internal LLM-powered applications.
- Vector Storage: Hands-on experience with Vector Databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus) for semantic search and context retrieval.
- Infrastructure as Code: Strong experience with IaC tools, particularly Terraform.
- Observability: Deep background in setting up observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., Databricks, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
- Security: Expertise in secrets management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) and robust IAM policy design.
- Internal Tools: Prior experience in internal application development, building developer portals (e.g., Backstage), or knowledge management systems.

Why Join Us?

- The Mission: Redefine computing for the next 50 years by solving the fundamental energy limitation of AI at a global scale.
- The Impact: Shape the company's future as a foundational team member. Enjoy massive ownership and an outsized opportunity to drive change.
- The Challenge: Dive into deeply complex, intellectually stimulating, and unsolved problems at the cutting edge of multiple, converging fields—you will be defining the future of AI compute.
- The Perks: A comprehensive package including competitive salary, significant equity, best-in-class health benefits, 401k matching, truly unlimited PTO, and complimentary meals when working from our Palo Alto office.

## About Unconventional, Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Unconventional AI is rethinking the foundations of a computer to optimize energy efficiency for AI by building analog chips that run neural networks directly on physics rather than simulating digital logic.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – raised $475M seed round)
- **Headquarters**: San Diego, California, United States (also has an office in San Francisco)
- **Founded**: Not explicitly stated; assumed ~2024/2025 based on funding announcement in December 2025
- **Founders**: Naveen Rao (CEO), Michael Carbin (co-founder), Sara Achour (co-founder), Meelan Lee (engineering leader)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Hardware design for artificial intelligence, analog computing, energy-efficient semiconductors
- Target customers: AI labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises that train and deploy large neural networks (B2B/Enterprise)
- Mission or purpose statement: *“Bringing biology-scale efficiency to artificial intelligence”* – building the right isomorphism for intelligence to unlock efficiency gains far beyond digital simulation

## Products & Services
- **Unconventional AI Chip Platform (in development)**: A novel analog/mixed-signal chip designed specifically for probabilistic AI workloads. The chip stores exact probability distributions in the physical substrate (silicon) rather than using numerical approximations, potentially achieving ~1,000x lower power consumption than digital computers. It is a **Hardware** product, supported by extreme codesign of algorithms and software.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $4.5 billion (as of December 2025 – seed round valuation)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding $475 million (seed round, December 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners (co-lead), Andreessen Horowitz (co-lead), Sequoia, Lux Capital, DCVC, Future Ventures, Jeff Bezos (individual), and others. CEO Naveen Rao personally invested $10 million.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Named to 2026 CB Insights AI 100 list
  - Headcount of 23 employees with +10.8% monthly growth
  - Monthly website traffic 27,433 (+21.7% growth)
  - Highly active on LinkedIn with 9,516 followers and frequent technical blog posts
  - Launched the “Unconventional Grant” program – $500,000 in funding for bold research ideas in AI compute

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-principles approach**: Rejects digital abstraction for analog/physics-based computation, achieving orders-of-magnitude energy efficiency improvements that conventional GPU architectures cannot match.
- **Extreme codesign**: Hardware, software, algorithms, and models are co-optimized from day one, not adapted from legacy computing paradigms.
- **World-class team**: CEO Naveen Rao (prior exits: Nervana→Intel, Mosaic→Databricks) plus co-founders with deep expertise in AI systems, analog circuits, computing theory, and neuroscience.
- **Massive financial backing**: $475M seed round at a $4.5B valuation provides a long runway for ambitious R&D.

## Strategic Focus
- **Near-term priorities**: Design and tape-out of analog AI chips; recruit top interdisciplinary talent across hardware, software, algorithms, and neuroscience.
- **Long-term direction**: Achieve “biology-scale” energy efficiency (on the order of 20W for human-level intelligence) and scale to meet projected global AI compute demand that could outstrip energy supply within 3–4 years.
- **Research investment**: Active grant program and open collaboration with academic/unconventional thinkers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Deeply interdisciplinary, first-principles culture that challenges assumptions – described as “endlessly curious, comfortable with discomfort, and drawn to the edge of chaos.”
- **Growth opportunity**: Very early-stage (only 23 employees) with massive ambition; employees can shape foundational technology from the ground up.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Two offices (San Diego HQ and San Francisco); likely hybrid or on-site given hardware work, but not explicitly stated.
- **Perks & environment**: Small team, high ownership, access to top investors and mentors, and the chance to solve one of AI’s most critical bottlenecks (energy).
- **Talent sources**: Employees come from Databricks, MIT, Cohere, and other top AI/tech organizations – strong peer group.

## Sources
1. [unconv.ai](https://unconv.ai/)
2. [unconv.ai/careers](https://unconv.ai/careers/)
3. [unconv.ai/blog](https://unconv.ai/blog/introducing-unconventional-ai/)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/unconvai)
5. [a16z.com](https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-unconventional/)

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