Founding AI Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/

Title of Role: Founding AI Engineer

Location: New York City, NY (Flatiron District)

Company Stage of Funding: Early-Stage Fintech

Office Type: Onsite — 5 Days/Week

Salary: $210,000–$250,000 Base + Equity

Employment Type: Full-Time

Company Description

Our client is a fintech technology company building a modern corporate access platform for investment banks and financial institutions.

The platform brings together CRM functionality, email communications, event management, reporting, and AI-powered meeting allocation to help financial institutions manage complex workflows more efficiently.

As the company expands its AI capabilities, it is looking for a Founding AI Engineer to build and deploy intelligent, agentic product features that enterprise financial customers can trust with real business operations.

This is a high-ownership opportunity to shape the company's AI architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction while working closely with its founders and product engineering team.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, and ship customer-facing LLM and agentic AI features into production.
• Own AI product development end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, evaluation, and ongoing improvement.
• Build reliable agent systems involving prompting, tool use, context management, and multi-step workflows.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and failure-handling mechanisms for production AI systems.
• Integrate frontier AI models into enterprise applications.
• Build backend APIs and services using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
• Deploy and operate AI-powered applications using AWS infrastructure.
• Collaborate with product engineers to integrate AI capabilities into customer-facing applications.
• Design systems that meet the reliability and operational expectations of enterprise financial institutions.
• Establish technical patterns, development processes, and engineering standards for the company's growing AI capabilities.
• Work directly with engineering leadership to identify high-impact AI opportunities and deliver production-ready solutions.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 4+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience shipping customer-facing LLM-powered features into production.
• Strong hands-on experience with frontier language models and their integration into real applications.
• Experience building agentic systems involving prompting, tool use, and context management.
• Understanding of production AI reliability, including evaluations, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.
• Strong Python backend engineering experience, ideally with FastAPI or Django.
• Experience developing and operating applications on AWS.
• Ability to independently own technically complex projects from architecture through production.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design capabilities.
• Experience collaborating with product engineers to deliver complete customer-facing features.
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.
• Comfortable working in a small, high-ownership engineering team.
• Able to work onsite in New York City five days per week.

Preferred

• Previous experience as a founding engineer, early AI engineer, or senior individual contributor at a startup.
• Experience building production-grade AI agents that perform meaningful business tasks.
• Experience designing AI evaluation pipelines and regression testing frameworks.
• Familiarity with LLM orchestration, tool calling, and structured outputs.
• Experience with AI observability, monitoring, and production incident resolution.
• Background in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, or regulated industries.
• Experience transitioning from traditional machine learning into production LLM applications.
• Experience establishing technical architecture and engineering processes for new teams.

Compensation & Benefits

• $210,000–$250,000 base salary
• Equity compensation
• Significant ownership over the company's AI architecture and product capabilities
• Direct collaboration with the co-founder and CIO
• Opportunity to establish the foundation for a growing AI engineering function
• Hands-on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities
• Onsite work environment in Manhattan's Flatiron District

This opportunity is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building real AI products, solving challenging reliability problems, and taking founding-level ownership of systems used by enterprise customers.