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ElementX

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Build production AI with people who'll make you laugh

A small, remote-first New Zealand team doing work that reaches real users at real scale. AI is part of how every function here operates, not just engineering.

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Currently hiring

Why ElementX

Four things you'd get here that most places can't offer in the same combination.

  • Frontier work, every day

    AI models and tools released in the last few months are part of daily work here, across all our business functions, not just our engineers. The people closest to the work get to use the newest things in it.

  • Real impact, real clients

    Mott MacDonald and the University of Auckland are two of our named deployments.

    See the rest on customer stories

  • People who have your back

    Small team, high trust. Founders Daniel Xu, Ming Cheuk, and Richard McLean are still hands-on in the business; you'll work alongside them, not several layers away.

  • Fun is part of the job

    We take the work seriously and ourselves less so. The pace is sustainable and the bar is high.

Remote-first, built on trust and ownership

We're a remote-first, NZ-based team. You own your work and we trust you to run with it: curious, creative, and given the room to take real responsibility from day one.

  • Optional office Fridays in Auckland
  • Regular team lunches
  • In-person celebrations for the moments that matter, including work anniversaries

Hackathons, build-offs, and conference stages

The team gathered around the living room of a beach house for hackathon demos
Demo hour at the summer hackathon
Five team members heads-down on laptops at a shared table, ocean visible through the window
Heads-down at the hackathon beach house
Dr Ming Cheuk seated on an AI panel at the Ethnic Xchange Symposium
On the AI panel at the Ethnic Xchange Symposium

How we work day-to-day

Three values that anchor how the team operates.

  • People first

    Founders are hands-on in the business and we hire deliberately. Small team, high trust, and people who back each other.

  • Go above and beyond

    We set a high bar and we hire people who already know this. Time for research and learning is protected, whatever your role.

  • Make it fun

    Remote-first and flexible, with the in-person moments that keep a distributed team connected. Sustainable pace, serious work, good company.

What we hire for, beyond the skills check

We hire for attitude and aptitude as much as experience.

  • Real engineering judgement

    Knowing when to use the LLM and when to use the database. When to use the framework and when to write the function. When the third-party API earns its place and when it doesn't.

  • A bias toward production

    Demos are easy; production is where the work happens. We hire engineers who think about uptime, observability, security, and the team that will inherit the code.

  • Curiosity that survives Monday morning

    The kind that doesn't need an offsite to surface. Reads papers without being asked; tries the new model the week it lands; asks why the existing thing works.

If you're a fit but the timing isn't

ElementX hires deliberately, not constantly. We may not have an opening that suits you today; we may in three months. If you've read this far and you can see yourself on the team, send a short introduction and a CV to HR@elementx.ai. The strongest candidates we already know about are how the next hire usually starts, so send the speculative application anyway.

Come build the things people actually use

See current openings across our teams