Team
7 min read
The Prax Team and Culture
We think of ourselves as a lab for creating new technology, and a deployment company for making it work in production. As such, some of our habits come from high-urgency deep-tech companies like SpaceX, while others come from our academic backgrounds as researchers in physics. While we take our work seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
As of writing, 82% of our team are engineers. For every hire, we ask whether this person is one of the most talented of their generation, and we write down exactly why we think so. We are very deliberate about creating an environment for these people to do their best work: direct communication with our customers and research partners. Our researchers and engineers are our product managers, programme managers, and customer success.
The clearest way to explain how Prax works is to introduce some of those people: why we hired them, and what they do at the company.
We look for people who combine knowledge of physical systems, often from backgrounds like physics or mechanical engineering, with applied AI experience. Jirka is a great example of this.
Jirka
At Oxford, Jirka was seen as one of the most promising physics researchers of his cohort, and managed the rare feat of being lead author on both experimental and theoretical work. Before that he won a physics olympiad medal, and took the top result at Cambridge in Advanced Quantum Condensed Matter. He then moved to startups as founding engineer at a legal AI company, where he trained and deployed models and built the infrastructure. He understands the AI stack from physics to models to products.
At Prax, Jirka works across research and deployments. He leads one of our key deployments and is a core contributor to our greenfield R&D. The breadth that made him stand out as a candidate lets him run a system in a live industrial setting and help invent the next one.
We also hire people who have exceptional intuition and taste for solving the high dimensional problems that occur in startups: the problems that span engineering, product, and organisation. Aaliya is a good example of this.
Aaliya
Aaliya co-founded and coaches the UK's national AI Olympiad team, and is one of the most deeply connected people in London's young tech scene. Before Prax, she started the Office of the CTO at Wise, the listed fintech company, and worked at a leading European pre-seed fund. She trained as an electrical engineer.
Her role at Prax draws on all of her experience. Aaliya started at Prax in London, often spending 5 weeks in a row away from home on back to back sales trips or deployments. She then moved to Austin to continue to work on site with our customers, deploying our products, analysing the data they produce and running the commercial relationships. The community she built is also one of the ways we find people like Dylan.
We put a lot of effort into very early-career talent. We believe people are capable of taking massive responsibility and achieving great things, regardless of if they’ve had a long formal education or many years in senior positions. Like every engineer here, they manage themselves, know which work decides whether we hit a timeline, and go all in when they're on the critical path. Dylan joined straight from his first year of university.
Dylan
We first met Dylan through the UK AI Olympiad. In 2025 he was selected for the UK's first ever national AI Olympiad team, and went on to win a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence in Beijing, competing against the strongest young AI students from around the world. He then started computer science at Imperial, one of the most competitive courses in the country, and finished his first year at the top of his cohort.
He had options at some of the best quantitative trading firms and tech companies, and we spent more than ten hours making our case for him to join us instead. He joined Prax as a summer intern, now works with us part-time alongside his second year.
At 20 and alongside his degree, he leads a four-person project using AI to automate a key piece of industrial equipment. Like every project lead at Prax, he's responsible for everything it touches, from AI research and software to supply chain and product. We don't wait for people to be senior before giving them real responsibility, and Dylan is a clear example of why.
We look for engineers who also have a strong grasp of commercial and economic questions. We treat the commercial side of a project as engineering work, done by the same people who build the system. Jonny is a prime example of this profile.
Jonny
Jonny graduated among the top five economics students in his year at Cambridge and started his career as a strategy consultant. He then moved into tech, coming from economics rather than computer science, and after 9 months, became the lead engineer in his very first engineering job. People who can do both at a high level are rare, and Jonny can reason through a factory's economics and write the code to model it.
At Prax, he's part technical salesperson, part economist. He builds financial models of our customers' factories, so we can show each customer in their own numbers what our systems are worth to them. He simulates how those factories will adopt AI, which informs how we approach each customer, and he writes internal tools for the rest of the team. Because he understands both the engineering and the economics, the commercial case for our systems is built by someone who knows exactly how they work.
We look for people who have built serious hardware at deeply technical startups, and who know what it takes to solve hard, ambiguous engineering problems in the real world, at pace. Arnav is a good example.
Arnav
Arnav joined us from Valar Atomics, the nuclear startup that raised a $1bn Series B after achieving net power criticality, one of the hardest hardware milestones there is. Building hardware for a company working at that level means he knows what it takes to make heavy machinery work in rugged, real-world conditions. Before that, he published research on dextrous manipulation in international IEEE journals, and led the design and development of a thermoplastic 3D printer from scratch at a previous hardware startup.
At Prax, he took charge of two of our core products from his first day, and under his supervision both are improving week on week. He brings the kind of hardware depth that only comes from working on some of the hardest machines being built today.
Where they go next
We encourage everyone to act like the CEO of their own area, and that tends to produce founders. People who leave Prax often start companies or join early-stage ones as founding engineers.
- Ben was a physicist turned AI researcher when we recruited him from academia. He left to found Mantic, which has built one of the best AI forecasters in the world.
- Theo and Ludvig came from Sweden to intern in their final year of university and joined full time after their last lectures. They were the first engineers on two of our most successful products, and are now employees two and three at Scape, a Y Combinator company building the best email client in the world.
We don't compromise
Many companies post a job advert and spend their time filtering applicants. We take a different approach. We spend our time finding the best people in the world for the work we do, building the networks to reach them, and making the case for them to join. In practice, this looks like our sponsoring the olympiads, then putting in a huge amount of effort to hire the team members like Dylan.
None of this is new. Hire unusually talented people, give them real ownership, work on the critical path, and don't take yourself too seriously. What's different about Prax is that we treat these as non-negotiable. We don't relax them when we're busy, when a role is urgent, or when a candidate is nearly there. We would rather hire one person a year than compromise on these principles.
If all of this sounds compelling to you, check out our open job roles.
