Founding AI Engineer

Role: Founding AI Engineer

Role: NYC

Salary: $190K-$240K + Equity

I'm partnered with an early-stage AI startup in New York that's looking for a Founding AI Engineer to join the core engineering team and play a major role in building its product from the ground up.

This isn't a research-only position. They're looking for someone who wants to ship AI products into production , work closely with the founders and have genuine ownership over technical and product decisions.

What you'll be doing

• Building and shipping AI-powered product features from 0→1
• Developing production LLM applications, agents and AI workflows
• Designing RAG, retrieval and data pipelines
• Evaluating models and improving output quality, latency and reliability
• Building backend systems and APIs around AI functionality
• Working directly with the founders on product direction and technical architecture
• Speaking with users, understanding problems and rapidly turning ideas into product
• Helping establish engineering standards as the team grows

What they're looking for

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Excellent Python experience
• Experience building real-world products using LLMs
• Hands-on experience with modern AI tooling and model APIs
• Understanding of RAG, embeddings, vector search and evaluation
• Comfortable working across backend, infrastructure and AI
• Startup mentality and happy operating in an ambiguous 0→1 environment
• Someone who wants ownership rather than a narrowly defined engineering role

Experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, LangChain/LlamaIndex, AWS/GCP and modern data infrastructure would all be valuable, although they're more interested in strong builders than someone ticking every box.

Location: New York City, hybrid

Salary: $190K-$240K base + meaningful early-stage equity

Stage: Early-stage / venture-backed

Role: Founding / early engineering hire