AI Experience Designer

Tolan • San Francisco, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

Tolan is an Embodied Companion—a cute AI alien you talk with naturally, like a friend. Tolans have their own personality and preferences, and over time form memories about you, your life, and your shared friendship. We're an experienced team that previously founded Even, acquired for $300M in 2022. Tolan is backed by the designers and founders behind Instagram, Retro, Behance, Vimeo, and Notion. Our team works hard, with an emphasis on autonomy and ownership. We're building together in-person in downtown SF.

The Applied AI Team is responsible for the experiments, evals, and prompts that power the product and bring Tolans to life. Your colleagues include behavioral researchers, science fiction writers, game designers, and operators with experience scaling systems to serve millions of users.

You’ll craft, deploy, and evaluate the prompts that shape Tolan personality and behavior. You'll work closely with design and engineering to develop new features and tune existing ones. A typical day involves creative writing, AI-assisted prompt development/deployment, and testing via both vibes and evals. This role is equal parts writing craft and technical intuition. You're shaping how an AI character feels to talk to—its voice, its personality, its emotional range.

Requirements

• A genuine creative practice—writing, art, game design, etc.
• A tendency to build when wanting to learn something new.
• Systems thinking—always looking for ways to automate or improve workflows.
• Experience creating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• Evidence of actively exploring AI as a creative medium (e.g., shipped side projects, hacked together tools, explored LLM capabilities).

Nice To Haves

• Unusual backgrounds such as writers who learned to code, engineers who write fiction, or individuals who have built and shared unique projects online.

Responsibilities

• Craft, deploy, and evaluate prompts that shape Tolan personality and behavior.
• Work closely with design and engineering to develop new features and tune existing ones.
• Engage in creative writing, AI-assisted prompt development/deployment, and testing.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed