General Application

About Delegance

Delegance is a deep reasoning R&D lab building autonomous AI systems grounded in a decade of DARPA-funded research in goal-driven autonomy, metacognition, and adaptive planning. Our systems don't wait for prompts — they deliberate, plan across long horizons, detect when reality diverges from expectation, and self-correct. When judgment is needed, humans are elegantly interleaved. Not as a fallback. As a capability.

We are not an AI wrapper company. We are building the cognitive architecture that lets an AI system operate an entire business — perceiving its environment, pursuing stakeholder goals through hierarchical planning, and monitoring its own reasoning for failures before they cascade. Our founders have 25+ combined years building autonomous decision-making systems, with $30M+ in prior research funding and 100+ peer-reviewed publications.

The future we're building is one where labor is free and your competitive edge is as good as your ability to imagine the future. It starts with the people at this company. It starts with you.

Who we're looking for

We're a small, intensely focused team. We're currently accepting expressions of interest from people with deep experience in:

• AI/ML Research Scientists — goal reasoning, planning, metacognition, neuro-symbolic AI, reinforcement learning
• AI/ML Engineers — building production systems that combine LLMs with structured reasoning and planning
• Software Engineers — full-stack, infrastructure, or systems engineering for autonomous platforms
• Applied Researchers — bridging the gap between published research and deployed systems
• General applications — if you don't fit a category above but believe you belong here, we want to hear from you

What we value

• Depth over breadth. We'd rather you know one thing extraordinarily well than five things superficially. The problems we're solving — goal-driven autonomy, self-monitoring agents, long-horizon planning — reward deep expertise.
• Conviction under uncertainty. We're building something that doesn't exist yet. You need the confidence to pursue a hypothesis and the intellectual honesty to abandon it when the evidence says so.
• Urgency without recklessness. We move fast because the opportunity is enormous and time-bound. But we ship systems that actually work — not demos that impress for five minutes.
• Tools-forward builders. We expect everyone to adopt advanced AI-powered coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, or whatever terrifying new thing dropped this morning). You're willing to ship to production but only after you've triple checked the LLM didn't hack the tests. Bonus points if you've built custom tooling to prevent LLM mistakes in your own workflows using non-LLM solutions.
• Battle-tested with LLMs. You've experienced firsthand the failures of LLMs in production and understand how other AI approaches overcome them.

Why Delegance

• Work directly with researchers who created Goal-Driven Autonomy and led DARPA programs on adaptive AI agents
• Build systems that operate real businesses today — not prototypes, not demos
• Early-stage equity in a company building at the intersection of AI research and autonomous operations
• Remote-first with optional co-location in San Francisco
• Small team, no bureaucracy, direct impact on everything we ship

How to apply

Send your resume and a brief note on what draws you to this problem to [email protected]. We read every application. If there's a fit, we'll reach out — it may not be immediate, but if a relevant role opens up, we'll connect.

Apply now