Founding Applied AI Engineer

Founding Applied AI Engineer

San Francisco | $180,000–$250,000 base + equity | Full-time | In-office | 1 opening

Experience: Typically 3–5 years, exceptional junior candidates welcome

Visa sponsorship: Available

Travel: Customer travel, including internationally

About the Company

This stealth, seed-stage startup is building an AI engineering platform for complex physical industries, essentially what AI coding tools are becoming for software engineers, but designed for the people who build engines, cars, aircraft, and other highly complex machines. Backed by top-tier investors and advisors from aviation, transport regulation, and heavy industry, the company already has signed commercial agreements with major manufacturers. Its initial focus is engineering compliance: helping manufacturers validate designs against the regulations and standards that ultimately become hard engineering requirements.

You'll join as the fourth engineer, working directly alongside the CTO and two founding engineers, all of whom have founded companies before.

About the Role

This is a founding-level engineering role for someone with a clear technical or product "spike." The company isn't looking for a generalist who is simply good at everything. Engineer #4 needs to raise the bar somewhere, whether that's hardware, infrastructure, AI, product, or technical strategy.

Raw technical horsepower, learning speed, and trajectory matter more than years of experience. You'll be expected to think like a founder: make difficult trade-offs, work directly with customers, understand their problems, and turn those insights into products. A genuine interest in hardware and physical AI is essential.

Your First Major Project

One of the company's key priorities is system modeling. You'll help build models that understand how the mechanical, electrical, fluid, thermal, and software subsystems of complex machines connect with one another, combining design data, engineering requirements, and other technical information. This is a highly interdisciplinary problem at the intersection of AI, engineering, and physical systems.

What You'll Own

• Build AI-powered engineering products for complex physical systems
• Develop models of how mechanical, electrical, fluidic, thermal, and software subsystems interact
• Work with engineering data, designs, and requirements
• Translate customer problems into practical product solutions
• Make founder-level technical and product trade-offs
• Work directly with customers and participate in sales conversations
• Help define the architecture and direction of the product
• Move quickly from concept to prototype to production

What We're Looking For

We're looking for exceptional engineers with a clear spike. Typically 3–5 years of experience, although exceptional candidates earlier in their careers are welcome.

The most important qualities are:

• Strong engineering intuition
• Excellent product judgment
• A clear area of exceptional technical strength
• Founder-level ownership and decision-making
• Ability to balance speed with technical quality
• Comfortable speaking directly with customers
• Strong interest in hardware, physical AI, and complex engineering systems
• Steep learning curve and evidence of exceptional potential

Strong Backgrounds

Relevant backgrounds may include:

• Founders, ex-founders, or strong startup operators
• Founding or product engineers
• Palantir, Anduril, aerospace, defense, or other frontier technology companies
• Frontier AI labs
• Engineers who have worked on complex technical problems under unconventional job titles
• CAD, 3D modeling, robotics, or simulation
• Hardware engineering or robotics projects, including significant university work
• Strong engineering programs such as Purdue, Georgia Tech, or UIUC
• Olympiad or ICPC achievements
• Research or technical work where the candidate deliberately chose a difficult path

Nice to Have

• Systems engineering
• Multi-physics modeling
• Robotics or hardware experience
• Lean infrastructure, including on-premise environments for defense customers
• Experience or interest in training custom AI models for customers

What This Role Is Not

This is unlikely to be a fit for:

• A solid generalist without a clear area of exceptional strength
• Engineers who are primarily infrastructure-focused without strong product instincts
• Candidates whose experience is exclusively at the largest technology companies
• Candidates motivated primarily by company prestige
• Engineers without meaningful standout work
• People who aren't genuinely interested in physical AI or hardware

Working Environment

• This is a fully in-person role in San Francisco.
• The company is ambitious and moves quickly, but this is not a 9–9–6 culture.
• The expectation is intense commitment when the work requires it, combined with a sustainable approach to building a company.
• Customer travel, including international travel, will be part of the role.
• Visa sponsorship is available.

Interview Process

The interview process will focus heavily on how you think, what you've built, and the decisions you've made. Candidates should be prepared to discuss:

• The toughest technical challenge they've successfully tackled
• The most difficult decision they've made
• Their strongest technical or product "spike"
• Why hardware and physical AI genuinely interests them
• How they approach ambiguous, high-ownership problems

This is an opportunity to become engineer #4 at a company building a new category of AI software for the physical world — with genuine founding-level ownership from day one.