Application Engineer

About the role

About Jan Jan is an open source AI assistant built by Menlo. It began as a private, offline alternative to ChatGPT and has grown into a general purpose agent that runs open models locally on your own hardware, or connects to frontier models like GPT, Claude, and Gemini when you want them. Give Jan a task and it works on its own until the job is done. Built in public around one belief: AI should be open, private, and answer only to you.

The Role We are looking for an Application Engineer to build and ship the Jan desktop app across platforms. You will own the application end to end, from architecture through packaging and distribution, working full stack across the web and native layers. This is a build-and-ship role, not a UI design one. You will care about how the app is put together, how it performs, and how cleanly it gets into users' hands on every platform. This is a lean, agent-native setup, so you will orchestrate coding and execution agents to move fast while keeping the judgment to get the hard parts right.

What You'll Do

- Build and maintain the Jan desktop app across macOS, Windows, and Linux using Tauri.

- Work full stack across the app: React and Node.js on the application layer, Rust on the native side.

- Own packaging, builds, and distribution: installers, auto-update, release pipelines, and code signing.

- Give Linux first-class support: packaging and distribution across common distros.

- Integrate local model runtimes and app features end to end.

- Work agent-natively as your default, running agents in parallel with your own review and guardrail discipline.

What We Look For

- Full-stack engineer, strong in React and Node.js.

- Hands-on experience building and shipping Tauri apps.

- Working knowledge of Rust.

- Desktop app development and cross-platform distribution experience.

- Solid Linux skills: packaging, distribution, and environment quirks.

- Proven ownership of app packaging, builds, and release pipelines.

- An agent-native default workflow and the judgment to hand-write critical code when it matters.

- Comfortable with full ownership, ambiguity, and shipping fast.

Nice to Have

- Familiarity with the Jan.ai http://Jan.ai ecosystem or other OSS desktop and LLM tooling.

- Experience with auto-update, code signing, and app store or package-manager distribution.

- Local model or inference runtime integration experience.

Why Join Menlo Jan is open-source, built in public, and already in the hands of millions. You will own a real product end to end, drive agents hard to ship at a pace a traditional team cannot match, and set the bar for how a lean, agent-native app gets built. If you want to be in the arena shipping something that matters, this is the place.

A Note on AI

You don't need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect everyone at Menlo to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement. When that's the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don't treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.