Founding Engineer, System 1 Models Engineering Remote, Sydney based

Founding Engineer, System 1 Models Remote, Sydney based Full time

Be the first engineer taking on billion-dollar giants.

We're two founders in Sydney, and Unilever is already our first enterprise customer. We're hiring one of Australia's best engineers to build the next part: acting on the whole customer in under half a second with System 1 models, and refining the agent harness that will run Paperbark's own model.

Brands spend billions on Customer Data Platforms. We're rebuilding the category.

Lighter, faster, and live in weeks, not months. Built for the age of agents.

Unilever, a Fortune Global 500 company, signed a paid contract with a team of two. Two of its brands are onboarding now.

02 What we do

Paperbark maps the customer journey to stop churn for consumer brands. We use our own data models to connect tens of millions of customer events, and find the revenue that brands miss.

03 The founders

• Took two products from zero to $1M in under 12 months.
• Runs go-to-market, operations and commercials.
• Former data scientist and AI engineer at VGW and Cashrewards.
• The fast path: from a visitor on a site to a decision in under half a second
• Agentic workflows that run in production for enterprise customers, with the checks that make them safe to trust
• Maintaining an enterprise-grade data warehouse and security controls in production
• Maintaining and improving our data pipeline infrastructure
• How we build: the stack, the standards, and the next hires

Your first 90 days

• Week 1 Ship to production inside the existing product.
• Week 12 Something you built, in front of a customer.

05 You'd be the perfect fit if

• You've managed big data systems in production for enterprise customers, and you know what breaks at scale
• You've taken language-model or ML systems from prototype to production, and kept them running
• You care about latency, and can tell us where the milliseconds go
• You're eager to work with System 1 models: small, fast models that make a judgement in milliseconds instead of reasoning for minutes
• You already run parallel streams of agentic development, and you review what they ship before it goes out. We expect it here
• You're happy to talk to a customer's engineering team directly
• You'd rather own a problem than a ticket
• Our stack is TypeScript and Python. Depth in one matters more than both

07 How we hire

• A 30-minute call with Eli.
• A paid half-day working session on a real problem, with both founders.
• References. We aim to decide within three weeks of your first call.