Member of Technical Staff (Product Engineering)
About ArettaOur mission is to make AI provably trustworthy, starting with the world’s software.
AI is about to write the world’s software. All of it, from the critical infrastructure everything depends on to the apps people use every day. We want a future where people decide what software should do and machines prove that it does. We’re starting with the tools engineers need to ship AI-written code knowing it’s correct.
Within six months of starting, we're deployed with paying design partners in databases and data infrastructure, where we've found 60+ critical bugs, including data-loss bugs that survived their testing and simulation stacks. We're backed by visionaries like Ion Stoica, Kurt Keutzer, Sanjit Seshia, Ram Shriram and Sriram Rajamani. The founders, Sushant and Adwait, were previously PhD and postdoc at UC Berkeley.
Formal verification has always been powerful and almost impossible to use. We’re changing that: we want proving code correct to feel as natural to every engineer as running tests. You’ll own that experience end to end. You’ll talk to customers to find what’s actually slowing them down, build a prototype yourself, test it with real users, and only then bring in the engineering team to build it properly. You decide what developers see when Aretta proves their code correct, or finds the bug that breaks it.
Problems you’d own
Make results convincing. A verification result is worthless if nobody understands it. Design how Aretta presents a proof or a bug so a skeptical senior engineer is convinced in under a minute.
Meet developers where they work. Developers live in their editor, their pull requests, their CI and, more and more, their coding agents. Make Aretta feel native in every one of them.
Make the first day count. A new team should go from sign-up to their first verified result the same day. Find where that journey breaks, and fix it.
Turn feedback into prototypes. Customers tell us what they want; how they use the product tells us what they need. Sit with design partners, watch them work, and turn what you learn into prototypes within days.
Make intent easy to state. Someone has to say what “correct” means for a piece of code. Design how engineers write down their intent, review it and come to trust it.
Make launches land. When we ship something, make people understand it: the demo, the walkthrough, the first page of the docs.
You don’t need to have done all of this. We care about how you’d approach it.
You might be a fit if
You’ve built products developers love, and you can explain why they love them. You prototype to think: when an idea comes up, you’d rather show a working version tomorrow than debate it today. You talk to users without a script and come back with the real problem, not just the one they described. You have taste and can back it up with evidence. You’re comfortable across the stack, from the interface to the API to the data behind it, and you care about the details nobody asked for.
You don’t need
A background in formal methods or theorem proving. You'll learn by working with us.
A previous title as a product manager or designer.
Bonus points
Demos and videos: you make polished demos or launch videos.
Developer tools: you’ve built editor extensions, command-line tools, GitHub apps or other developer tools.
Docs: you’ve written documentation people actually read.
Founding experience: you’ve started a company before.
Who we hire
We hire at every level, and we mean it. If you’re senior, you’ll come in as a hands-on engineer and grow into leading and building a team. If you’re early in your career, fresh out of school or a few years in, you’ll get real ownership fast and as much scope as you can take on. What matters is the same bar for everyone: mastery, the drive to grow, and the instinct to help others grow too.
Compensation and logistics
Benefits: unlimited PTO, health, dental and vision insurance, and a 401(k).
How we work
We work in roughly six-week cycles: five intense weeks, then a week for reflection, polish, feedback and mentorship. We bring opinionated ideas backed by evidence, bias for action, fix the class of problem rather than the instance, and close the loop with the people we serve. Read more in Our Culture.
Aretta comes from aretē, the Greek word for excellence and virtue: becoming the best version of yourself in everything you do. We value excellence for its own sake, and we believe it’s built across a whole life, not just the hours at a desk.
We work in person in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the right person we’ll consider remote, so don’t let location stop you from applying.
Our hiring process is probably unlike any you've been through, so please read about it before you apply. Everyone joins Aretta the same way: No puzzles, no whiteboards, and the process typically takes about a week end to end (subject to scheduling availability). You share real work you've done, then we spend a few hours on a real problem together to get a mutual feel for working side by side. Learn more here: How We Hire.