Software Engineer

Company Overview

We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.

Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.

We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.

About the Role

Protege is hiring a Software Engineer for our Presentation team, the squad that builds the surfaces where Protege's data catalog meets the people who use it.

That means two products

the internal dashboard our team uses to catalog, curate, package datasets, and the customer portal where AI labs browse, stream, and evaluate content before they license it.

This is a product engineering role in a TypeScript and Next.js codebase. You'll talk directly with the people who use what you build, design the interfaces yourself, and ship the whole feature: UI, API, data model, and tests. The datasets behind these screens are large and multimodal (video, audio, motion capture, documents, medical imaging), so a lot of the craft is making that volume feel fast, legible, and good to use in a browser. This role is ideal for engineers who want to ship whole features, not tickets, and grow fast by building directly for the people who use their work.

What You’ll Do

• Ship features across our internal dashboard and customer-facing portal, from design through tests and rollout
• Talk directly with the partnerships, solutions, and sales teams who use what you build; watch how they work, find the friction, and turn it into features

Design the interfaces you build

layout, hierarchy, interaction, and the empty, loading, and error states, often starting from a rough idea rather than a finished mock

• Build the workflows our catalog and solutions teams use every day: sample creation, customer access management, and delivery exports
• Build the customer-facing experience for browsing, streaming, and evaluating multimodal samples
• Implement playback, preview, and file-handling UX for content that lives across buckets
• Build UI on top of embedding-based search so users can find the right clips within catalogs of millions
• Extend and consume the API routes behind these surfaces (Next.js route handlers, Postgres, AWS)

Handle sensitive data correctly

scoped access, secure share links, and PHI-aware routes

• Contribute to our shared design system and component library, and write tests as part of shipping

What Success Looks Like

30 days: Learn and Build Relationships

• Ship your first features to production in both apps
• Sit with the teams that use our tools while they work; come back with a list of the friction you saw

Build a working map of the catalog domain

how content is ingested, curated, sampled, and delivered, and which teams touch each step

60 days: Develop and Cultivate

• Own well-scoped features end to end with light guidance, from a one-line ask to shipped, tested product
• Make design decisions on your own features that hold up: clear layouts, sensible states, interactions that feel right
• Become the go-to engineer for at least one surface area (e.g., delivery exports or customer access flows)

90 days: Make an Impact

• Deliver a meaningful feature independently, from talking to the people who need it through design, build, and rollout.
• Contribute at least one improvement to our shared UI components or testing patterns that other engineers pick up

What You Bring

Must Haves

• 2+ years building production web applications that real users depend on
• Strong TypeScript and React, with experience in Next.js or a comparable full-stack framework

You've shipped user-facing features end to end

UI, API, data model, and tests

Design sense

you can take a feature from rough idea to a clean, usable interface, and you notice when spacing, hierarchy, or an interaction feels off

• Comfort working across the stack, including Postgres and cloud services (we use AWS)
• You notice when a flow is confusing or slow, and you fix it without being asked
• Comfort with ambiguity and evolving priorities; you'd rather ship and iterate than wait
• Curious and proactive

Nice to Haves

• Experience with media playback in the browser (HTML5 video/audio, HLS, containers and codecs)
• Experience building search or data-heavy interfaces over large datasets
• A portfolio, side projects, or shipped work that shows your eye for UI
• Familiarity with auth systems (we use Clerk) and permission modeling
• Experience working with sensitive or regulated data (HIPAA, PHI)
• Prior startup experience

Protege Values

Pass the Loved Ones’ Test

We act with integrity and do the right thing — especially when it’s hard and no one is watching.

Always Find a Way

We are resourceful, resilient builders who solve hard problems and push through obstacles.

Go Fast and Grow Fast

Velocity matters. We move with urgency, learn quickly, and continuously improve as individuals and as a company.

Practice Kindness and Candor

We communicate directly and respectfully, building trust through honest feedback and genuine care for one another.

Deliver Together

We win as one team. Collaboration, accountability, and shared ownership drive our success.

Own the Outcome. Hone the Craft.

We take pride in our work, sweat the details, and continuously raise the bar for excellence.