Founding AI Engineer

Our client is an early-stage, investor-backed software company building AI-powered infrastructure that helps organizations automate complex business operations. Following a successful funding round of over $13M, they're growing their engineering team and investing heavily in the platform that powers intelligent, production-scale AI applications. The team is composed of experienced engineers and startup operators passionate about bringing cutting-edge AI systems into real-world enterprise environments. As a AI Founding Engineer , you'll build the core platform that enables AI-powered workflows to operate reliably at scale. You'll develop the systems responsible for orchestrating models, managing execution pipelines, integrating external services, and continuously improving agent performance. This role sits at the foundation of the product and directly influences how enterprise customers automate high-value operational workflows. What You'll Do Build and scale backend infrastructure that powers AI-driven workflows, including orchestration, execution pipelines, context management, and third-party integrations. Develop intelligent routing services that determine how multiple language models are selected and coordinated throughout complex workflows. Create evaluation, benchmarking, testing, and observability frameworks that measure AI performance and detect regressions before production releases. Transform emerging advances in LLMs and agentic AI into reliable, production-ready platform capabilities. Collaborate closely with product and AI engineers to improve workflow quality through prompt optimization, execution logic, model routing, and production feedback loops. Help shape engineering standards, platform architecture, and technical direction while contributing to the growth of a high-performing engineering organization. What You'll Bring Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or another highly technical field from a leading university, along with 2+ years of professional software engineering or AI experience. Experience building and deploying production AI platforms, including LLM applications, intelligent workflow automation, autonomous systems, or similar AI-powered software. Strong understanding of modern AI infrastructure, including model orchestration, retrieval systems, tool integration, evaluation pipelines, prompt engineering, RAG, and fine-tuning techniques. Ability to translate open-ended technical problems into scalable, maintainable production software. Genuine interest in rapidly evaluating and adopting new AI technologies as the ecosystem evolves. Strong software engineering fundamentals with a focus on scalability, reliability, testing, monitoring, and long-term maintainability. Compensation & Benefits Base Salary: $230,000–265,000 Equity: Meaningful early-stage equity with significant long-term growth potential. Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite) Show more Show less