AI Engineer - Startups

AI Engineers: Let 100+ Companies Compete For You

Fonzi is an AI recruiting company.

No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront.

Every week, hiring managers at 100+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They’re reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you’ve built, how you think about systems, and whether you’re the kind of engineer who ships.

Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They’re backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.

How It Works

• 5-minute application

• We reach out, learn what you’re building and what excites you, and optimize your profile

• Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want

• Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you

• You only interview where you’re genuinely interested

• Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime w/ questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination

Who We’re Looking For

The engineers who do best on Fonzi:

• Have built AI-powered products end-to-end, not just prototypes, but systems handling real users

• Can talk fluently about retrieval, memory, agent frameworks, context engineering, eval pipelines and anything else at the cutting edge

• Combine strong software engineering fundamentals with deep awareness of what’s happening at the frontier of LLMs and agentic systems

• Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small

• Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with experience at at least one high-growth company

Compensation

• $200,000 – $400,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.

The Interview Process (Typical)

• Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit, genuine curiosity about AI

• Technical deep-dive talks on architecture thinking, how you’d design an AI system for a real problem

• Coding or pairing sessions building

If you’re an engineer who’s been building with AI because you can’t stop thinking about it we want to hear from you.