Join Us | Careers | AE Studio

JOIN US

Work with the world’s most effective developers, data scientists, designers, and leaders who are shaping the future of humanity.

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What's all this about shaping the future of humanity?

We build software that increases rather than decreases human agency.


Designed to be friction-free.

Function as a seamless extension of ourselves.

Easy-To-Remember User Flows.

Amplify our transcription fluency.

Change only when necessary - only when beneficial.

Sacrifice short-term economic gains for long-term customer value.

In short, we’re building products to equip and empower people.
And to accomplish all of that we need the best of the best.

We hire the world's best developers, the Top 0.1%

We have high standards. We won’t let anyone near client work who cannot meet those standards. A players hire A players and everyone else drags down their performance. We fix that problem by employing only top performers. If you aren’t one, you shouldn’t work here.This is an off-the-charts amazing place to be a top-notch engineer - because your teammates are too!

Most of the people at our company are the smartest people we know. We ask everyone to think of the smartest most competent people who actually ship and get stuff done they’ve ever met are. And then we figure out a way to hire them.

Check out what they say about us on Clutch

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The client has been exceedingly satisfied with AE Studio. They’ve stood out for their process, which has successfully delivered professional results within time and budget. They provide constant updates and communicate effectively. Moreover, they’re collaborative and accommodating partners.

AE Studio produces satisfying deliverables with impressive speed. The team is flexible and assesses challenges thoroughly, which results in the implementation of effective solutions. Their dedication, attentiveness, and valuable recommendations enable ongoing collaboration.

You should work here if

  • You’re the best engineer on a team of excellent engineers

  • You make your teammates better and they love you for it (you’re not an arse)

  • You get things done and get better while you’re at it

  • You bring a founder level mentality to everything you do

  • You treat client work (and everything) else with the love and care you would give your own start-up

  • You love solving problems for customers, users, and humans everywhere

  • You can balance maker vs manager time, and produce value during both

  • You communicate extremely effectively

  • Clients will love you (rather than tolerate you as a talented jerk)

  • You’re less enamored with intricate code than with creating value

  • You’re capable of creating billions of dollars of value for the most innovative clients in the world and for the projects we incubate internally

We guarantee our clients that we will treat their projects like they are our own - with the mentality of a founder. We cannot staff projects with anyone who cannot embody that guarantee. We won’t risk the brand. We also develop internal “skunkworks” (sold the first a year ago) products with similarly stratospheric standards for the user experience they provide. You can found one yourself! Of course, if you aren’t a world-class developer, designer, or data-scientist, that’s less likely to work so the same standards apply. Thus, sometimes, we fire someone quickly. Of course, most of the time, the result is building an elite cadre of technologists who can make your startup MUCH more likely to flourish than if you built it on your own. We require the best of the best, and IF you can hack it, it’ll be worth it!

Ultimately, we only hire folks who exemplify our core values - good devs should be good people too.

Our Core Values

Growth Mindset

We believe everyone can grow and evolve. We look for ways to improve ourselves and things around us and enjoy rising to the challenges in front of us.

Acceleratingly Larger A/B Tested Baby Steps

We don’t believe in leaving things that can be better stagnant or reinventing the wheel. We take bigger and bigger baby steps that start small and are continually tested until they work. Compounding, accelerating progress is more powerful than people can imagine.

Overcommunicating (rather than undercommunicating)

We believe in effective communication with clarity and generosity and its ability to prevent most problems, both between individuals through things like feedback, and on teams through great tools, processes, and practices that encourage overcommunication.

External Structures

We understand the value of and create structures as an extension of ourselves that allow us to be fully present, like notes, lists, an optimized laptop, or great people, to augment our own thinking, productivity, and happiness.

Be a Good-Tripper

We believe that if everyone does more than their fair share, figures out what needs to be done and does it with ownership mentality, and encourages others to do the same, we will go faster, further, and defeat the prisoner’s dilemma, as the best, happiest versions of ourselves.

Balance Steelmanning with Working Plans

We believe the best decisions come from empathizing, articulating, and improving counter-arguments to ourselves and others from a place of excitement and generosity. We consider all ideas hypotheses while moving forward with ideas that get the job done.

With great work comes great rewards!

Multi-Company Equity Plan

We receive equity from amazing clients whose MVPs we help assemble (and who we help raise their next round). We also generate equity from the Skunkworks projects we incubate. Every year, we share some of this equity with our team as “profits interest.”

Equity in Different Baskets

Rather than putting all your eggs in one basket, become a mini-VC (as long as you are part of the AE team) and earn additional equity each year. Our team doesn't ride out 12-18 months until their equity vests so they can quit… they continue building amazing, agency-increasing tools for themselves, our clients, and humanity.

Unique Equity Model

And remember, the number of client projects and incubated skunkworks grows as a function of the number of AE team members. The upside is large. The risk is diversified. The model is unique.

Becoming a founder

Our clients offer an incredible perspective on the landscape of development and data science. When client work shines a spotlight on opportunities to increase human agency with technology, AE's employees can found startups internally, often with the first customer already sold!

Incubated Skunkworks

These incubated Skunkworks projects offer founder-level equity to those who build them and additional equity to all AE employees. Found a startup where you know your co-founders are phenomenal, your product is desired, and your support network is an incredible team of experienced founders, developers, data scientists, and designers!

Company Retreats

Once or twice a year, we try to gather the team together and we have a lot of fun with drinks, Hackathons, and other team activities. But don't be scared, we are aware of the introverts!

This is how we work

Remote work

Have more freedom, more time. But we also have offices that you can work in, and we do like to interact with people and clients in person.

Flexible schedules

Work out a schedule that fits with your team and you’re good to go. We know that forcing night owls to start work at 6am isn’t the best for productivity.

One on One

Short weekly meeting where you can talk about various things. You can find ways to grow, share feedback, improve processes, and share exciting things that you’re working on.

Highly collaborative

We help each other out. We have a network of amazing developers and data scientists working on different projects who are always willing to share their knowledge. There are no egos here.

Agile + Product Focused

Effective communication & collaboration that’s not annoying and actually helps get work done. Our processes work, and they make sure you constantly know you’re headed in the right direction.

Clean Code

Separation of Concerns, Don't Repeat Yourself, Avoid Mental Mapping, Unambiguous Names, and more. These are just some of the things we do to make our code great to work on right now and in the future.

Clean Agile

We work fast and get things done! At the same time, we keep our codebase healthy. In the long term it makes it easier to maintain, make changes and implement new features. A clean code base makes everyone happier and increases everyone's Agency!

This is some fun stuff we do

Skunkworks

Some of the coolest tech products started out as fun side projects. We actively encourage our team members to build out their own ideas and spend time learning new technologies and expanding their skillsets.

Open Source

We like to hire people who contribute to open source and we contribute to open source ourselves.

Hackathons

Twice a year, we come together and spend one entire day coding. Many great ideas start from something small and silly that can be fully released in a single day.

Rocks

Every quarter everyone brainstorms ideas for things that we can do to improve ourselves and the company, growing and moving towards our goals together.

you'll potentially meet with

Melanie
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
  • Former CTO at To The Tens, co-founder of ELIX, and Full Stack Developer and leader at several LA-based start-ups
  • TDC talks, lunch talks
  • Blockchain expert
  • Product Focused Development
  • 10+ years of experience building products and leading teams
Ed
HEAD OF DATA SCIENCE
  • Interested in opportunities involving machine learning, deep learning, and distributed computing as a means of processing and analyzing large datasets.
  • B. Magna Cum Laude in Chemistry & Physics from Harvard College and Ph.D from Cal Tech in Experimental High Energy Particle Physics.
  • 15+ years experience using statistics and machine learning
Rafael
CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER
  • Managed a business that impacted the lives of over 150k people
  • Experience working with startups
  • Great Facilitator/Mentor
  • 15+ years of experience
Cristian
PRODUCT DESIGNER & MANAGER
  • Experience in multiple verticals such as SasS, E-commerce, Fintech, Mobility, and Healthcare
  • A life-long learner with a growth mindset, he's passionate about improving himself and creating thoughtful and high-impact work
  • 10+ years of experience

Oh, finally the job titles!

Before you apply, you should know that
  • there's a pretty high standard for performance so if you're looking to coast it's probably not the best fit
  • if you do get hired you'll go through an intensive onboarding process where people who aren't a good fit just quit or get fired
  • you'll be expected to communicate with clients, make them know they're in good hands, and make them know they can absolutely count on us to do the right thing for their business
  • we expect people that we hire to be able to wear any hats and be able to give clients the AE guarantee. The AE Guarantee: We’ll treat your product or project like it’s our own startup and do whatever it takes, with a founder-level mentality, to make it spectacularly successful
  • we work on a flat structure, if you care about titles it's probably not the best fit