Technical Co-Founder, Exponentials — Build AI That Puts Human Intention First

AI is becoming extraordinarily capable. The defining question is whether that capability strengthens the people using it. Exponentials is building personalized discovery around human intention: what someone wants to find, understand, accomplish, or become. We are seeking an exceptional technical co-founder who wants to turn that vision into a trusted product and help build the company behind it. Study https://exponentialsdiscovery.com/, explore the live demo, and read our essays on human–AI co-evolution. If the mission resonates and the engineering challenges excite you, we should talk. **The opportunity** Most digital discovery begins with a platform’s objectives. Exponentials begins with the person. Users express their needs; AI explores relevant possibilities, explains why results fit, and learns through feedback while preserving the user’s authority to choose. Our ambition is an evolving personal World Model connecting interests, goals, preferences, and constraints across ecommerce, healthcare, education, and media. Someone’s life crosses these boundaries. Useful intelligence should understand those connections without silently assuming permission or deciding what matters for them. We believe this architecture can address a central source of the AI backlash: people questioning whose interests increasingly powerful systems actually serve. Trust, agency, and useful outcomes are product requirements with commercial consequences. A live proof of concept exists. The opportunity now is to establish what works, challenge what does not, and build the foundations for a differentiated, scalable business. Exponentials is receiving strong interest from several of the world’s leading investors, adding momentum to this early founding opportunity. **What you will own** You will work directly with the founder on technical strategy, product decisions, architecture, execution, and the engineering team. You must enjoy writing code, investigating failures, making difficult tradeoffs, and translating an ambitious thesis into products people repeatedly choose. Build the discovery pipeline: natural-language intent understanding, retrieval from reliable sources, entity resolution, constraint-aware ranking, and evidence-backed explanations. Results must connect users to real, relevant destinations, with uncertainty clearly identified. Develop the World Model: distinguish stated preferences from inference, scope constraints appropriately, update context as goals change, and give people meaningful ways to inspect, correct, withhold, export, or delete their information. Make cross-domain personalization useful and accountable. A budget for shoes should not automatically become a healthcare constraint. A recommendation should explain its evidence and assumptions. User feedback should visibly improve subsequent discovery. Create the evaluation and operating discipline: repeatable tests, source provenance, observability, security, access controls, latency and cost measurement, failure recovery, and controlled deployments. Measure successful discovery and user understanding alongside engagement. Use AI agents to accelerate engineering, research, verification, and operations. Determine where Grok, other models, APIs, and conventional software genuinely help. Build explicit approval boundaries for consequential actions and maintain evidence that humans can inspect. Help recruit outstanding builders, establish engineering standards, and explain the technology clearly to prospective partners and investors. **Who should apply** You have personally shipped substantial software and can show what you owned, how it performed, and what failed. Strong experience in applied AI, search, recommendations, data systems, or personalization matters more than fashionable terminology. You can architect across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure; evaluate model behavior critically; and balance speed with reliability. You understand that a persuasive generated answer is not the same as a verified result. You bring entrepreneurial judgment, intellectual honesty, product taste, and the confidence to challenge the founder constructively. You can narrow an expansive vision into an excellent first experience while designing for what comes next. **The working relationship** This posting seeks a potential long-term technical co-founder through an initial freelance collaboration. We will discuss a bounded paid diagnostic, mutual expectations, availability, compensation, and any potential equity arrangement before committing. Cofounder fit must be established through working together. **How to respond** Share two relevant systems you personally built, with links or a brief demonstration and your specific contribution. After exploring Exponentials, identify its strongest technical opportunity, its most consequential unproven assumption, and one concrete improvement to the demo. Propose your first 30 days: the experience you would prioritize, what you would measure, and what you would deliberately defer. Include your availability, proposed diagnostic scope and fee, and what you need from a founder to do exceptional work. Help build AI that expands what people can discover—and what they can do with their lives.