MTS - Research

Poke

$120K — $180K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of engineering experience focusing on scalable, high-performance systems.
  • Experience with high-concurrency, low-latency distributed architectures.
  • Proven background in product development and iterative workflows.
  • Strong understanding of developing tools and APIs for extensibility.
  • Knowledge of training methodologies and model evaluations in AI contexts.

Responsibilities

  • Stabilize high-load systems while continuing to deliver new features.
  • Design extensible primitives that cater to both current and future product needs.
  • Prototype and iterate on new agent workflows from conceptualization to production.
  • Develop and maintain APIs and SDKs for external developer engagement.
  • Optimize agent performance through advanced training techniques and evaluations.

Benefits

  • Collaborative team culture that values technical craftsmanship.
  • Opportunities to work with a talent-dense team from prestigious technical backgrounds.
  • Flexibility in choosing programming languages; focus on problem-solving over specific tech stacks.
Full Job Description
The Context

For the last year, our core engineering team has built this entire agent platform from the ground up. Now, traffic and concurrent agent executions are scaling by orders of magnitude. We need engineers to harden infrastructure without slowing down feature velocity.

We only care about technical depth, obsession with your craft, and how well you can build alongside us. Our current team is strongly connected and talent-dense, with backgrounds from Jane Street, MIT/Stanford research, and International Olympiads, but we care more about experience building than your pedigree.

The Role

We hire across many strengths under one title. You are a T-shaped engineer who can navigate the whole stack, but you are uniquely experienced in at least one of these areas:
  • Scale & Infra: High-concurrency, low-latency, distributed state under heavy load.
  • Product: Prototyping, shipping, and iterating on agentic workflows zero-to-one.
  • Extensibility & DevTools: APIs, SDKs, and primitives that make Poke programmable by external developers.
  • AI Runtime & Evals: Tool use, model selection, and output quality in production.
  • Post-Training & Alignment. SFT, preference optimization, reward modeling, synthetic data generation, eval design, and improving agent performance through training rather than prompting.


We work mostly in Typescript and some Python, but lack of experience in these specific languages is not a deal breaker.

What we're looking for
  • Rigor under pressure. You move between infra, product, and debugging. You can stabilize melting systems while still shipping features.
  • Platform thinking. You design primitives, not one-off features. You build solutions that solve today's product needs while unlocking ten future use cases.
  • Low ego. The talent bar is high, but no important problem is beneath us.


Something Else

If you don't fit perfectly into a bucket, that's fine. We care more about ownership and technical depth over specific labels.

Tell us what you are unusually good at, what systems you've owned, and why it transfers here. Include a link to your GitHub, a project you're proud of, or a breakdown of the hardest technical problem you've solved.

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