Tolan is an Embodied Companion: a cute, friendly AI alien that you talk with naturally, like a friend. They have unique preferences and personalities, and over time they form memories about you, your friendship, and your life. Tolan is built by an experienced team with a lot of history together. We previously founded Even, acquired for $300m in 2022. Our engineering team comes from places like Apple, Square, and character.ai. Our design and creative team has won Apple Design Awards and designed products like Facebook and Dropbox. Our investors include the designers and founders behind products like Instagram, Retro, Behance, Vimeo and Notion. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF.

A note on this role This is a role we're creating for the first time as of January 2026. Over the past 3 months we've observed a step-function change in the reliability and capabilities of long-running AI agents. We've re-oriented our own work around this new reality, and our most effective engineers now spend more time orchestrating agents than writing code directly. We believe our hiring should re-orient as well. This new role is our first attempt to find people who thrive in this new mode of working.

We're certainly not the only people adjusting to this new reality—Karpathy's recent thoughts resonate with what we've been experiencing.

The role This isn't a management position—you won't have direct reports. But you'll need every skill that made you a great engineering manager. You'll break down ambiguous problems, delegate to agents, review their work critically, and course-correct when things go sideways. You'll design and operate complex agent orchestration systems, develop patterns for human-agent collaboration, and ship real product features primarily through agent-assisted development.

You might be a fit if you:

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent in engineering management or tech lead roles
• Know how to delegate, scope work, and give feedback that actually improves output—skills you've honed managing people
• Have hands-on experience with AI coding assistants and agent orchestration
• Have strong opinions on when to use agents vs. when to do it yourself
• Thrive in ambiguity and have a knack for turning fuzzy goals into concrete, well-scoped tasks
• Genuinely enjoy the "managing agents" workflow

Bonus points if you:

• Have built or contributed to agent orchestration tooling
• Have written publicly about AI-assisted development workflows
• Have experience with long-running, multi-step agent systems
• Left management because you missed building, but still miss the parts of management that were about clarity and leverage

Why Tolan If you're an AI maximalist, you probably want to work directly on AI—not just use it as a tool. At Tolan, that's exactly what you'll do. We're building AI that's accessible and legible to everyone, in the form of a trusted and healthy best friend.

You'll work alongside people who live at the frontier: our CTO Evan Goldschmidt has published work in partnership with OpenAI on AI memory and personality; iOS tech lead Dan Federman has published extensively on AI agents in iOS build systems; and science fiction writer Eliot Peper uses AI to craft the unique universe and personalities of the Tolans. We're a small team where your work will shape both the product and how we build it.