Founding Applied AI Engineer — Proactive AI Agents

Employment Type: Full-time
Base Salary: $300K–$500K
Equity: Substantial founding-level / competitive equity
Visa: Open to visa transfers and new sponsorship
Relocation: Relocation support available
Team Size: 3 employees (Founded 2026)
Hiring Goal: 1–2 candidates

About Client

A research-first, product-led AI company building the next generation of personal, proactive AI agents. Rather than building chatbots or copilots that wait for instructions, Centaur is developing agents that understand how people work, anticipate their needs, and autonomously pursue objectives on their behalf over days, weeks, and months.

The platform observes how individual users work — including screen activity, conversations, and actions across tools — to understand intent and human judgment. It learns repetitive workflows, proactively automates tasks that do not require human judgment, and continuously improves from feedback when its predictions differ from users' actual decisions.

About the Opportunity

As a Founding Applied AI Engineer, you'll join a tiny, high-agency founding team at the earliest stage of building truly autonomous, proactive AI agents. This is not an implementation role — you'll help define product direction, ideate solutions, and independently own the end-to-end build of agentic systems from 0?1.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship agentic AI systems and agent harnesses that power Centaur's proactive, autonomous agent platform
• Take personal ownership of 0?1 ML/AI model-based products — from technical architecture through production deployment
• Operate across product, engineering, models, and infrastructure — this is a broad, cross-functional role, not a narrowly scoped one
• Help define product direction, ideate solutions, brainstorm features, and make independent technical and product decisions
• Build systems that learn user intent and workflows from screen activity, conversations, and cross-tool actions
• Continuously improve agent performance based on feedback loops between predicted and actual user decisions
• Work in close, daily collaboration with a tiny founding team where every engineer has outsized influence on product and technical direction

Required Qualifications

• 2–6 years of professional experience as an Applied AI Engineer or in a substantially equivalent hands-on Applied AI engineering role
• Experience at a relevant technical environment: an AI lab, an applied AI startup, an AI-focused startup with directly relevant work, or an infrastructure company
• Demonstrated 0?1 ownership of a production ML/AI model-based product or agentic system — you personally built and shipped it, not just contributed to an existing system
• Hands-on experience building agentic systems, agent harnesses, or model-based AI/ML products (candidates whose AI experience is entirely in adjacent areas such as computer vision, speech, or robotics, without agentic systems experience, are not a fit)
• Deep, professional-level Python expertise — basic familiarity, academic use, or occasional scripting is not sufficient
• Demonstrated ability to operate across product, engineering, models, and infrastructure
• Demonstrated product ownership and ideation — defining direction, brainstorming features, and making independent technical/product decisions, rather than primarily implementing predefined specs
• Willing and able to work onsite in San Francisco 5 days/week (firm requirement — remote work is not being considered)

Strongly Preferred

• Early-stage startup engineering experience
• Early hire at a high-growth AI startup
• Company founder experience
• Major product ownership
• Strong university background from a top-tier global institution
• Frontier AI lab experience
• Strong research background combined with demonstrated product shipping

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