Member of Technical Staff

Locke is building towards a simple reality: every organization in America should be able to engage with the public sector, and the way to get there is combining exceptional policy talent with great AI.

Locke is the first AI-native government affairs firm, helping some of America’s most innovative companies lobby policymakers and win government contracts.

Government affairs is a blend of information, process, and relationships. We’re building our own internal AI systems to supercharge the 3 - delivering outcomes with speed and precision, while amplifying human judgment and capabilities. We’re not selling an AI tool to companies and walking away. We’re owning the entire outcome: from lobbying, to writing government contract proposals, to deep message testing, all with incredible humans-in-the-loop.

Locke is backed by Y Combinator and Paul Graham, with a founding team from The White House, Congress, and the Pentagon.

The Role:

We're hiring Members of Technical Staff - engineers who build the AI agents and systems at the heart of everything we do. You'll sit close to founders, government officials, and to the people who depend on your work every day, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

What we're building

Government runs on an enormous, constantly-changing pile of unstructured data - bills, rules, dockets, agency filings, and comment periods spread across Congress, federal agencies, and 50 states. We're building agents that understand all of it and turns it into action for our clients. Specifically, that means:

• Agents that ingest legislation and regulations, reason over them, and produce real work product - memos, alerts, strategy, and proposals - reliably enough that our team stakes client relationships on it
• Retrieval and data pipelines that keep those agents fed with accurate, up-to-date information from messy, inconsistent government sources
• Eval frameworks that measure whether an agent's output is actually correct and useful
• The product surfaces our team works in all day - drafting tools, monitoring dashboards, and alerting
• Over time, the shared intelligence layer that sits underneath the entire company

What You'll Do

• Build and own the AI agents our team relies on = end to end, from prototype to production
• Treat our policy staff as your users: ship the tools they depend on, and make them faster and sharper
• Build the retrieval and data pipelines that feed our agents accurate legislative and regulatory information
• Design eval frameworks to measure and steadily improve the quality of what our agents produce
• Work closely with our non-technical team - tight collaboration between our technical and non-technical people is how the agents get good
• Help build the technical playbook as we grow!

What We're Looking For

• Solid engineering experience: full-stack product work, applied AI/ML, or a closely related field
• You've built and shipped real LLM-powered products and agents
• You're comfortable with the modern AI stack - building agent workflows, wiring up retrieval, and writing evals to keep quality honest
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity - you figure things out and drive them to completion
• Tokenmaxxer: if you are not a power user of Claude Code / Codex / Cursor, this is not for you.
• Bonus: genuine curiosity about government, policy, or regulated industries. You don't need a Hill background, but you should be excited to learn the domain

Logistics

• In-person 5–6 days a week in SF, with occasional travel
• Meaningful founding-level equity, plus competitive salary, benefits, and PTO. Compensation will grow rapidly with performance
• Fun: we like traveling, grabbing food, and frolicking around SF / DC together
• You must currently be based in the United States. If you are not, do not apply.