Founding Engineer at ElevenLabs - Remote EU/Global — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
ElevenLabs' Founding Engineer (Ads Engine) role is highly nomad-friendly — it's explicitly remote-first with no mandatory office attendance. The key constraint is timezone coverage: you must be able to operate in European timezones, and the geographic window runs from US East Coast (UTC-5) to India (UTC+5:30). This is a generous range that covers most of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Popular nomad hubs that fit this window include:
- Lisbon, Portugal (UTC+1): Excellent fit — squarely in EU timezone. Cost of living around $2,000–$2,800/month for a comfortable nomad lifestyle. Portugal's Digital Nomad Visa (D8) is straightforward for non-EU nationals.
- Tbilisi, Georgia (UTC+4): Very affordable (~$1,200–$1,800/month), visa-free for most nationalities up to 1 year, and comfortably within the allowed timezone band.
- Chiang Mai, Thailand (UTC+7): Borderline — slightly outside the preferred window but manageable with early starts. Very low cost of living (~$1,000–$1,500/month). Thailand's LTR visa suits remote workers earning above a threshold.
Travel-relevant perks are strong: a social travel stipend for colleague meetups, an annual full-team offsite (past destinations: Croatia, Italy, Cancún), and a monthly co-working stipend if you're not near a hub office. These perks are tailor-made for a nomadic lifestyle.
The role is async-friendly by culture (lean, autonomous teams), but European business hours overlap is a real requirement to keep in mind when planning base locations.
About ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is an AI research and product company transforming how we interact with technology.
We launched in January 2023 with the first human-like AI voice model. Today, we serve millions of users and thousands of businesses — from fast-growing startups to large enterprises like Deutsche Telekom and Meta. Our investors are some of the world's most prominent, including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth and Sequoia. We've raised $781M in funding and our last valuation was $22B — multiples of 11, always.
We have expanded from voice into three main platforms:
- ElevenAgents enables businesses to deliver seamless and intelligent customer experiences, with the integrations, testing, monitoring, and reliability necessary to deploy voice and chat agents at scale.
- ElevenCreative empowers creators and marketers to generate and edit speech, music, image, and video across 70+ languages.
- ElevenAPI gives developers access to our leading AI audio foundational models.
Everything we do is the result of the creativity and commitment of our team — builders doing the best work of their lives. We are researchers, engineers, and operators. IOI medalists and ex-founders. If you want to work hard and create lasting positive impact, we want to hear from you.
How We Work
- High-velocity: Rapid experimentation, lean autonomous teams, and minimal bureaucracy.
- Impact not job titles: We don't have job titles. Instead, it's about the impact you have. No task is above or beneath you.
- AI first: We use AI to move faster with higher-quality results — across the whole company, from engineering to growth to operations.
- Excellence everywhere: Everything we do should match the quality of our AI models.
- Global team: We prioritize your talent, not your location.
What We Offer
- Innovative culture: You'll be part of a generational opportunity to define the trajectory of AI, surrounded by a team pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
- Growth paths: Joining ElevenLabs means joining a dynamic team with countless opportunities to drive impact — beyond your immediate role and responsibilities.
- Learning & development: ElevenLabs proactively supports professional development through an annual discretionary stipend.
- Social travel: We also provide an annual discretionary stipend to meet up with colleagues each year, however you choose.
- Annual team offsite: Each year, we bring your entire team together in a new location — past offsites have included Croatia, Italy, and Cancún.
- Co-working: If you're not located near one of our main hubs, we offer a monthly co-working stipend.
About the Role
We are building an ads engine that learns as it goes: brand book, taste, and what actually performs in every market. It plans, generates, localizes, launches, and learns from ads across the major ad platforms, using ElevenLabs' full audio and video stack.
You'll be a founding engineer for a product area of your own. There's no PM and no handed-down spec. You'll talk to users, decide what to build, and ship it across the stack — from data pipelines and agent tools to the UI. Early work could include feeding competitive intelligence into the engine's weekly briefs or launching a new ad format.
We're looking for founders and founding engineers. You'd rather ship a rough v0 on Friday than a perfect design doc. Strong engineering is the minimum. What sets people apart is product judgment and ownership.
Requirements
- Has built and shipped a product end-to-end without anyone handing them a spec, ideally as a founder or one of the first engineers.
- Strong full-stack product engineer (frontend- or backend-leaning is fine) who can build a pipeline, an agent tool, and the UI.
- Builds with LLMs and agents pragmatically: tools, retrieval, and evals — not model research.
- Talks to users without being asked, and can articulate what they'd build first and why.
Bonus: Experience with ad platforms, adtech or marketing tools; analytics and attribution; web builders and CMSs; taste in creative.
Location
This role is remote-first and can be executed from anywhere between the US East Coast and India, with the ability to operate in European timezones required. If you prefer, you can work from our offices in Bangalore, Dublin, London, New York, and Warsaw.
#LI-Remote
We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, or other legally protected statuses.
Frequently Asked Questions
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