Founding Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage consumer AI team as a founding engineer, building agent systems and product features from architecture through launch. You will help shape a simple, engaging AI experience while improving the infrastructure behind it.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve the agent harness, including tool use, memory, system prompts, retrieval, and evaluations.
• Own features across a consumer chat app and its backend, from design and implementation through launch and iteration.
• Work with the founding team to bring chat, agents, tools, and app capabilities into a cohesive consumer product.
• Expand agent capabilities with virtual machines and advanced tooling, and develop backend and database infrastructure for scale.
• Help deploy and optimize GPU infrastructure, including fine‑tuning and serving efficient open‑source models.
• Balance latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and user experience across product and infrastructure decisions.

What We're Looking For

• One to five years of hands‑on engineering experience, including startup work or sustained independent or open‑source projects.
• Experience building agentic systems beyond basic LLM SDK integrations, including tool calling, memory, system prompts, and retrieval.
• Hands‑on experience serving, fine‑tuning, or evaluating open‑source LLMs.
• Strong full-stack or backend engineering skills, with experience in scalable databases and consumer products.
• A shipped product or project with measurable adoption, users, or revenue, plus a public GitHub portfolio with recent personal work.
• Clear communication and the ability to take ownership in a fast‑moving, in‑person team.
• Early‑stage startup, applied AI, consumer product, open‑source, or sustainability experience is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $150,000 to $250,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On‑site in New York, New York.