Founding AI Engineer

We’re partnering with a rapidly growing early-stage AI startup building an intelligent software platform for some of the world’s most complex engineering and industrial environments.

The company is tackling a genuinely difficult technical problem: turning huge volumes of unstructured engineering information into structured, deterministic and actionable outputs using a combination of LLMs, algorithms, applied mathematics and graph optimization.

Already working with major enterprise customers, including Fortune 500 design partners, the company is experiencing significant commercial growth and is now looking for a Founding AI Engineer to join its small, highly technical team in New York.

The Opportunity:

This is not a narrow AI/ML role.

You’ll work directly with the founder and existing engineering team, taking ownership across AI systems, algorithms, backend engineering, infrastructure and technical architecture.

You’ll help build the core platform from an early stage, solve difficult technical problems with limited precedent, and establish architectural decisions that future engineers will inherit.

For the right person, there is significant scope for the role to develop into broader technical leadership as the company scales.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Architect, build and own core parts of an AI-native software platform.
• Develop systems that turn non-deterministic AI inputs into reliable, structured outputs.
• Build and improve LLM-powered extraction and data ingestion systems for highly complex technical documents.
• Solve challenging algorithmic, graph and optimization problems.
• Build production systems across Python, Go and cloud infrastructure.
• Scale AI systems from local experimentation into shared production environments.
• Make fundamental architectural and technical decisions alongside the founding team.
• Work directly with customers, product requirements and engineering problems rather than operating within a narrow technical silo.

What We’re Looking For:

We’re much more interested in raw ability, ownership and trajectory than checking every technology box.

You could be an experienced startup engineer who has already helped build a company from an early stage, or a slightly earlier-career engineer who is exceptionally talented, ambitious and learns extremely quickly.

Ideally, you’ll bring:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to architect and build production systems.
• Experience owning meaningful products, platforms or technical systems end-to-end.
• Strong Python experience; Go experience is highly valuable but not essential.
• Experience building with LLMs or modern AI systems beyond basic API integrations.
• Strong algorithmic problem-solving ability and comfort working through difficult mathematical or optimization problems.
• A product engineering mindset, comfortable moving across AI, backend, infrastructure and architecture when required.
• High agency, curiosity and an appetite for operating in a very fast-moving startup.
• The ability to learn unfamiliar technical concepts quickly rather than relying solely on previous stack familiarity.

Particularly Interesting Backgrounds

• Early or founding engineers at high-growth startups.
• Engineers who have taken products from zero-to-one or seed through significant growth.
• AI/ML engineers with unusually strong software engineering and algorithmic foundations.
• Engineers with backgrounds in applied mathematics, optimization, graph algorithms or complex systems.
• Mechanical, electrical or other engineering backgrounds combined with strong software experience.
• People who build things outside of work, hardware, software, electronics, open-source projects or their own products.

Tech Environment:

**Python Go GCP Kubernetes Terraform GitHub LLMs Data/Document Ingestion**

Specific stack experience is secondary to engineering ability. The team is looking for people who can understand difficult problems quickly and figure out the right tools to solve them.

Why Join?

• Founding-level ownership
  • influence the architecture, product and engineering culture from an extremely early stage.
• Technical leadership trajectory
  • genuine opportunity to grow into a major technical leadership position as the business scales.
• Hard technical problems
  • work beyond standard LLM wrappers on algorithms, optimization, structured data and reliable AI systems.
• **Real c…