Founding Software Engineer – Data & AI Systems

Founding Software Engineer – Data & AI Systems

**New York City Early-stage AI company**

$200,000 - $280,000

I’m working with an early-stage AI company in New York that is building software used in real-world, high-stakes environments.

The business has been founded by an experienced team who have previously built and scaled a successful technology company through exit. They’re now building their initial engineering team and are looking for a senior engineer to take significant ownership of the data and systems architecture behind the platform.

This isn’t a traditional Data Engineer position.

They’re looking for a strong software engineer who enjoys designing systems from first principles, someone comfortable thinking about how large volumes of data are ingested, processed, stored, retrieved and ultimately used by AI/LLM-driven applications.

You’ll work directly with the founders and CTO, with considerable autonomy over both technical decisions and what gets built.

What you’ll work on

• Designing scalable data processing and ingestion architectures
• Building pipelines and services handling complex, high-volume data
• Designing event-driven, distributed and asynchronous systems
• Making architectural decisions around storage, retrieval, reliability and performance
• Building the data layer behind LLM and agent-driven applications
• Working with retrieval, context, tool use and structured data in AI workflows
• Taking loosely defined problems and turning them into production systems
• Working closely with users and the founding team rather than simply receiving requirements

What they’re looking for

• Strong commercial software engineering experience, ideally with Python
• Deep experience with data systems, pipelines or large-scale data processing
• Strong system design and software architecture skills
• Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Databricks or similar
• Strong understanding of SQL/databases and modern cloud infrastructure
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs, agents, RAG or AI-assisted development
• Comfortable using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or similar, while understanding and owning the code being produced
• Able to work independently in an environment where the answer isn’t always defined in advance

Experience in an early-stage company, as a founding engineer or building products from 0→1 would be useful, but it isn’t essential.

The important thing is that you’re a strong engineer who can reason deeply about data and systems, make architectural decisions independently and build the resulting solution.