Careers

Build AI that can be defended in a deposition.

QGI is a founder-led team building the deterministic AI stack for regulated decisions. We are hiring the people who want to do the most careful work of their careers — not the fastest, not the loudest, the most careful.

See open roles Internships General interest

Open roles

Internship tracks

2026

Founding cohort

San Diego

Headquarters

Who we are

A small team, a sharp problem.

QGI builds a deterministic AI stack for regulated decisions — credit, claims, compliance, risk scoring. Our customers are institutions whose AI outputs have to be defended under audit, regulatory review, or litigation. Our product contract is that every QGI decision is explainable, replayable, and audit-defensible by construction.

The team is led by Dain Ehring, the Silicon Valley CEO who previously founded Dorado, and Dr. Sam Sammane, PhD in formal verification with 20 peer-reviewed publications. We operate lean by design. Every person on the team ships a layer of the stack end-to-end.

If you want to work inside a large research org with a grant mechanism and a committee-driven roadmap, we are not that. If you want to ship a specific, high-stakes product to customers who will read every word of its output — we want to meet you.

How we work

Four principles we actually run on.

The product contract is sacred

We ship deterministic, replayable AI for regulated decisions. If a change to the stack weakens that contract, we don't ship it — even if a customer asks. Discipline over revenue, forever.

Small team, high ownership

Every person on the team owns a layer of the stack end-to-end. No committees, no status theater. If you like being the person a problem lands on — and the person who is visibly accountable for the outcome — you will thrive here.

Write the work down

Verbal reasoning evaporates. Written reasoning compounds. We write specs, postmortems, design notes, and public explainers because the product's guarantee is that its reasoning can be read. The team's work should meet the same bar.

Regulated customers set the bar

Our customers operate under CFPB, state regulators, HHS/ONC, OMB, and internal AI Governance. We build to that pressure on purpose. Nothing sharpens a product like a regulator reading the output line by line.

Open roles

Three seats. Every one ships the stack.

Plus 4 internship tracks — AI coding; research in laws, empathy, and security.

Doesn't fit? Tell us anyway →

Research Full-time Open now

Research Engineer — Neural-Symbolic Reasoning

San Diego, CA (hybrid) · Remote considered for exceptional candidates

Apply

Work directly with Dr. Sam Sammane on the QAG Engine's reasoning kernel. You'll design, implement, and benchmark the neural-symbolic pipeline that produces QGI's seven interpretable signals — polarity, scope, coherence, conflict, provenance, temporality, confidence — over the Q-Prime quantum hypergraph.

You must have

PhD in CS, formal methods, logic, or a closely related field — or equivalent publication record
Deep familiarity with at least one of: theorem proving, SAT/SMT, decision procedures, neural-symbolic systems, or formal verification of ML
Comfort reading and contributing to open-source research code (PyTorch / JAX)
Clear writing — you will own the public technical reasoning behind signal design

Nice to have

Exposure to quantum-inspired methods (CUDA-Q, tensor-network models, hypergraph encoders)
Prior work applied to regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government)
Published at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CAV, FMCAD, AAAI, or similar

Engineering Full-time Open now

Enterprise Solutions Engineer — Financial Services

San Diego, CA or remote · US-based

Apply

You are the engineer who sits next to a mortgage compliance officer, a claims adjuster, or an AML analyst and turns their governance checklist into a live QAG Engine integration. You will own pilot deployments end-to-end — from first-touch discovery through an audit-defensible production run.

You must have

5+ years building customer-facing software integrations in financial services, insurance, or another regulated industry
Strong Python and TypeScript; comfortable reading and extending the QAG Engine SDK
Track record of shipping a complex ML or decisioning system through an enterprise procurement and compliance review
Ability to hold the technical line in a room with customer risk, legal, and compliance leaders

Nice to have

Worked on an AI Governance implementation in financial services, healthcare, or another regulated environment
Familiar with NVIDIA AI Blueprints / CUDA-Q or willing to become so
Prior experience in a small, customer-zero engineering role at a founding-team stage

Go-to-market Full-time Open now

Founding Account Executive — Regulated Enterprise

San Diego, CA or remote · US-based

Apply

Lead QGI's enterprise pilot-to-production motion in regulated industries, starting with financial services. You will own the hand-off from a technical evaluation into a paid deployment and carry the revenue number for the anchor vertical as the team scales behind you.

You must have

Enterprise closer with a proven record in infrastructure, data, or AI sold into financial services or insurance
Comfortable working with CROs, Chief Compliance Officers, and AI Governance leads — not just IT buyers
Sold a technically deep product at founding-team stage (no SDR/AE factory behind you)
Owned ACVs in the $250K–$1M+ band with <6-month cycles
Clear referenceable wins with regulated buyers

Nice to have

Background operating at a fintech, regtech, data, or AI platform selling into regulated enterprise buyers
Relationships inside mortgage GSEs, top-25 U.S. banks, or top-15 global insurers
Familiarity with pilot-to-production contracting patterns in regulated spaces

Internships

Four tracks. Built for depth, not résumé filler.

Rolling applications for students and early-career researchers who want regulated-AI problems with real artifacts — code, memos, study protocols, or threat models — not generic busywork.

Other internship idea →

Engineering Internship Rolling

Internship — AI coding

San Diego, CA (hybrid preferred) · Remote within the U.S. considered

Apply

Ship real code against QGI's reference stacks and tooling — SDKs, evaluation harnesses, blueprint adapters, and internal developer experience. You work beside senior engineers on issues sized for a learning cadence, with code review that reads like a syllabus.

You must have

Current enrollment in a CS, CE, or comparable program — or a public portfolio that substitutes for it (repos we can run, not résumé padding alone)
Comfort in Python or TypeScript and git; you can land a reviewed change that includes tests or equivalent verification
Written English clear enough to document what you changed and why

Nice to have

Curiosity about deterministic inference, graph algorithms, or neural–symbolic systems
Prior open-source contributions or competition / research code we can read end-to-end

Legal & policy Internship Rolling

Internship — Research in laws

San Diego, CA (hybrid preferred) · Remote within the U.S. considered

Apply

Support the team translating statute, agency guidance, contracts, and model governance policies into claims QGI systems must satisfy before they ship. You read primary materials, extract obligations and conflicts, and write memos the product and field teams can act on.

You must have

Coursework or equivalent depth in contracts, administrative law, civil procedure, financial services regulation, or adjacent compliance — you can name the frameworks you have read, not only taken exams in
Patience for dense text and a habit of citing section and paragraph when you argue a point
Interest in AI governance instruments (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act risk tiers) as applied artifacts

Nice to have

JD, pre-law, paralegal, or policy graduate work; compliance internship experience in mortgage, payments, or insurance
Second language if you want to track cross-border regulatory divergence

Research Internship Rolling

Internship — Research in empathy

San Diego, CA (hybrid preferred) · Remote within the U.S. considered

Apply

Study how experts and end users interpret QGI outputs — trust cues, explanation depth, friction when systems surface conflicts, and recovery after errors. You help design interviews, synthesize transcripts, and connect findings to product patterns for regulated human-in-the-loop deployment.

You must have

Background in HCI, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, philosophy of mind, or ethics with qualitative methods coursework
Ability to run structured sessions (with oversight), take neutral notes, and handle sensitive details under confidentiality rules
Respect for institutional review and customer confidentiality — you sign the same agreements as full-time staff

Nice to have

Experience with lightweight surveys or analyzing text in reproducible notebooks
Prior work in accessibility, safety, or responsible-AI research communities

Trust & security Internship Rolling

Internship — Research in security

San Diego, CA (hybrid preferred) · Remote within the U.S. considered

Apply

Contribute to threat modeling, secure design reviews, dependency hygiene, and incident-readiness documentation for the stack that handles customer evidence. Scope stays concrete — no vague red-team theater; every artifact ties to a ship milestone.

You must have

Coursework or self-study equivalent in systems security, applied cryptography, networks, or secure software engineering
Comfort reading vulnerability advisories, CVE write-ups, and engineering postmortems without hand-waving
Familiarity with one mainstream OS and one cloud provider at the level of having deployed and hardened a non-trivial toy service

Nice to have

CTF, bug bounty, or security club experience with write-ups you can share
Exposure to compliance regimes (SOC 2, HIPAA technical safeguards, FedRAMP family concepts) from the defender’s side

The process

Four steps. No surprises.

We will tell you exactly where you stand at every step. No ghosting, no “we'll be in touch,” no interview-panel theater. If we don't think it's a fit, you will hear why.

Intro & materials

Send a CV and one artifact that shows how you think — a paper, a repo, a teardown, a deal narrative. We read it before the call.

Founder conversation

A real conversation with Dain or Sam — depending on role. We share the company plan openly. You share what you actually care about. No trick questions.

Work sample

Paid, time-boxed work sample sized to the role. Research: a reasoning problem + brief. Engineering: a small, deployed integration. GTM: a 2-page pursuit plan for a named account.

References & offer

We reference-check both ways — you talk to people who have worked with us, we talk to people who have worked with you. Offer inside a week of the final meeting.

FAQ

Before you ask.

Are you remote-friendly?

Our default is hybrid in San Diego. We consider fully remote within the U.S. for exceptional candidates in the three full-time roles and the internship tracks, provided you can overlap four hours of the Pacific working day and travel to customer sites when the role requires it. We do not hire outside the U.S. at this stage.

Do you sponsor visas?

For the Research Engineer role, yes — we will sponsor H-1B transfers and support O-1 / EB-1 pathways for candidates with a strong publication record. For the enterprise and GTM roles, we hire only U.S. work-authorized candidates at this stage because of customer-site access requirements.

Are internships paid?

Yes, for the hour band we agree on together — we treat internships as real work with real compensation, not unpaid busywork. If your academic program requires a for-credit placement with specific paperwork, tell us in your application and we coordinate with your institution when their rules allow.

Is the work sample paid?

For full-time roles, yes. We pay a flat $1,500 (research or engineering) or $750 (GTM) for a time-boxed sample — typically 6 to 10 hours of focused work. You keep everything you produce. Interns follow the lighter exercise described in the internship section instead of these dollar bands.

How do you think about equity?

Founding-cohort equity with a standard four-year vest and a one-year cliff. Specific grant bands are shared in the first founder conversation — they vary by role and level and are benchmarked to Option Impact / Pave data for a stage-matched AI infrastructure company. We favor meaningful grants for the founding cohort and transparent bands as we scale.

I don't fit any posted role. Should I still reach out?

Yes — if you are exceptional at something directly connected to deterministic AI, regulated enterprise, or formal methods and you can articulate why QGI in particular. Use the general interest application and be specific about what you would build.

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