Founding Engineer – AI-Native Systems

Founding Engineer – AI-Native Systems

Location: New York City, NY (on-site, 5 days per week)

Salary: $150,000–$250,000 base + 0.5–2% equity

Working hours: Full-time, approximately 8:00 AM–8:00 PM

Relocation: Supported

Open positions: 3

About the Company

Our client is a seed-stage AI company bringing AI-native systems to the offline economy, starting with consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. These are the companies responsible for getting products into the hands of consumers through physical and online retailers.

The company is building a foundational decision layer that transforms how finance, sales, and operations teams work, combining advanced AI architectures with complex enterprise data.

The founding team consists of exceptional mathematics and science competition alumni who have gone on to build and lead teams at prominent technology and financial services companies. The business is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors and experienced industry operators.

About the Role

As a Founding Engineer, you will be one of the company's first employees, playing a pivotal role in defining its technology, architecture, and engineering culture.

You'll design and deliver modern, agent-first systems for enterprise customers, working across the entire technology stack from foundational infrastructure to production-ready AI applications. This is an opportunity for an entrepreneurial engineer who thrives on ownership, complex technical challenges, and building products from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities

• Build foundational infrastructure: Design and develop infrastructure supporting both single-tenant and multi-tenant hosting environments.
• Solve complex data challenges: Develop systems for extracting, processing, and structuring messy datasets at terabyte scale.
• Develop AI agent architectures: Create the core building blocks for multi-step, memory-intensive agents, including data access controls and policies.
• Deliver production systems: Deploy reliable, scalable AI agents for large enterprise customers.
• Own end-to-end technical delivery: Translate customer requirements into robust, cross-stack technical solutions.
• Shape the engineering culture: Help establish the technical standards, working practices, and culture of an ambitious founding team.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience in backend or full-stack engineering, ideally involving data pipelines, extraction systems, or other complex technical products.
• Production experience with a server-side programming language such as Python, Go, Java, or Rust, alongside TypeScript.
• Proven ability to define and deliver cross-stack technical designs for customer-facing products.
• Strong experience with AI-native development tools and workflows, such as Claude Code, including agentic workflows, loops, and MCPs, or comparable technologies.
• Experience building payment systems, AI agent architectures, or similarly complex production systems.
• Excellent debugging skills and strong intuition for diagnosing and resolving production issues.
• Experience working at a Series B or earlier-stage company, with clear ownership of a product, system, or major technical initiative.
• US citizenship or permanent residency (green card) is required; visa sponsorship is not available.

Ideal Background

We're looking for an entrepreneurial engineer who has demonstrated the ability to build, ship, and take ownership in demanding environments.

Particularly strong candidates may have:

• Worked as a founding engineer or early-stage startup builder, with end-to-end responsibility for technical delivery.
• Experience in forward-deployed engineering, working directly with enterprise customers in traditional or legacy industries.
• Built data pipelines or extraction systems that directly powered customer-facing products.
• Progressed quickly into senior or staff-level responsibilities.
• Studied computer science at a leading university or demonstrated exceptional engineering ability through an alternative path.

Previous experience at an early-stage startup is essential. Candidates should be able to demonstrate meaningful ownership and impact within a company at Series B or earlier.

This role is best suited to engineers with a track record of building and delivering products, rather than candidates whose experience has been limited to larger, established organisations. Frequent job changes without a compelling track record of company quality or meaningful impact are unlikely to be a fit.

Interview Process

The selection process is designed to assess technical depth, ownership, and alignment with the founding team's culture.

1. Initial founder interview.
2. Founder-led culture and values interview.
3. Technical deep dive covering a recent project and a short architecture design exercise.
4. Two-day, on-site work trial in New York City.
5. Reference checks.
6. Offer.

Why Join?

• Founding-team ownership: Help shape the technology and culture of an early-stage AI company.
• Meaningful equity: Participate directly in the company's long-term success.
• Complex engineering challenges: Build agent-first systems that tackle real-world enterprise problems at scale.
• Direct customer impact: Deliver technology that transforms finance, sales, and operations in traditional industries.
• High responsibility: Work across infrastructure, data engineering, AI architecture, and production deployment from day one.

If you're an exceptional engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems, building from first principles, and taking ownership of technology that makes a real-world impact, this is an opportunity to help build something from the ground up.