Founding AI Engineer | Frontier LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | NYC

Founding AI Engineer | Frontier LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | New York City Due to regulatory constraints this role is only open to US citizens. We’re hiring for a high-bar founding AI engineering team building mission-critical LLM, RAG & agentic systems for complex aerospace & defence operations. The bar (& current team) is high. Only the top 0.1% of AI Engineers can do this. If you’ve built real mission-critical LLM systems that can’t fail - this could be your next move. The Role You’ll own & scale a RAG-driven AI system powering critical aerospace operations. Expect to tackle retrieval quality, latency bottlenecks, & eval-driven fine-tuning head-on for the most innovative & exciting real-time systems in Aerospace today. This is full production ownership - from architecture to metrics. You should have experience with: Deploying LLM-based systems at scale (Llama, Mistral, GPT-4, Claude) Retrieval optimisation - hybrid search (BM25 + vector), reranking, caching Evaluation - recall@k, precision@k, groundedness, hallucination metrics Fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), RAG architecture, LangChain / LlamaIndex Tooling: Hugging Face, Weaviate/Pinecone, FastAPI, PyTorch, Redis, Postgres Monitoring inference, eval automation, & continuous improvement loops Bonus: IoT or Hardware integration or real-time systems experience exp. Ideal background: CS, ML, applied maths, EE or similar technical background Proven 0-1 experience in a fast-moving AI, defence-tech, aerospace, infra or hard-tech environment Strong software engineering instincts - not just model experimentation Experience shipping reliable GenAI systems into real users or operational workflows Comfortable working directly with founders, domain experts & technical customers You’ll be expected to: Own the LLM pipeline end-to-end – retrieval → evaluation → fine-tuning Improve accuracy, grounding, and eval metrics continuously Make architecture decisions for scale, reliability & speed Collaborate directly with founders & domain experts Stack: Python PyTorch FastAPI Postgres Redis Docker Kubernetes Weaviate or Pinecone LangChain or LlamaIndex AWS or GCP Offer: Up to $500,000+ base salary + equity Hybrid in NYC Tight-knit, high-output team High ownership, real impact, flat structure Interview Process: 1) Technical Deep Dive 2) Technical Assessment or Live Pairing 3) Panel focused on mindset & team fit Equal Opportunity We're hiring for an Equal Opportunity Employer. If you want to build AI systems that move beyond demos and into real-world, mission-critical use, then a conversation would be worth your time. TL;DR - Senior AI Engineer (NYC, On-site) Build & scale production-grade GenAI systems from 0 to 1 Own and improve RAG pipelines - accuracy and latency matter Deep experience with LLMs, LangChain, Hugging Face & real deployments Must have shipped working GenAI products , not just prototypes Ideal: startup DNA, top-tier CS degree, fast execution mindset $500K base + equity *All our new jobs are posted here 1st: linkedin.com/in/sufyanbashir/ Show more Show less