Founding AI Engineer

Our client is a venture-backed AI startup reimagining how enterprises automate complex operational work through intelligent software. Having secured more than $12M in early funding from top-tier investors, the company is entering its next phase of growth and expanding its engineering organization. The team is made up of experienced startup builders and AI practitioners focused on developing production-grade autonomous systems that solve mission-critical business problems. As a Founding AI Systems Engineer, you'll be responsible for the platform that enables intelligent agents to reason, act, and improve over time. You'll design the infrastructure that coordinates AI workflows, manages model interactions, and ensures reliable execution at enterprise scale. Your work will sit at the center of the product, supporting customers operating complex financial and operational processes across industries such as infrastructure, industrial technology, and defense. What You'll Be Building Design and scale the infrastructure that powers autonomous AI workflows, from task coordination and execution to context management and external system integrations. Build intelligent inference and orchestration services that optimize how different language models are selected and combined for each workflow. Develop automated testing, benchmarking, and monitoring systems that measure AI quality and identify performance regressions before deployment. Turn emerging advances in LLMs and agentic AI into resilient production services capable of handling complex enterprise use cases. Partner with product and applied AI engineers to improve system behavior using real-world production data, refining prompts, routing logic, and execution strategies. Contribute to engineering culture by helping define technical architecture, development best practices, and hiring as the team grows. What They're Looking For Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline from a top university, with 2+ years of software engineering or AI experience. Experience delivering production AI software, including LLM-powered applications, autonomous agents, workflow automation platforms, or similar intelligent systems. Strong understanding of modern AI infrastructure, including model orchestration, retrieval pipelines, tool integration, evaluation frameworks, and techniques such as prompting, fine-tuning, and RAG. Proven ability to take ambiguous, research-driven ideas and build scalable software that performs reliably in production. Passion for staying current with the latest AI advancements and rapidly incorporating new techniques into real-world products. Strong engineering fundamentals with an emphasis on testing, observability, reliability, and long-term maintainability. Compensation & Benefits Base Salary: $225,000–260,000 Equity: Significant early-stage equity with meaningful long-term upside. Location: San Francisco, CA (5 days onsite) Show more Show less