Full Stack AI Engineer | Onsite in New York | Local Candidates Only, 5

Location: New York, NY | Schedule: Full-time, onsite five days per week

Overview

An early-stage, cutting-edge AI startup in New York City is seeking a Full Stack AI Engineer with strong zero-to-one product-building experience. This is a fully onsite role based in a Manhattan office, and the company is looking for a highly hands-on engineer who can help build and launch AI-native products from the ground up, working closely with the founders to turn ideas into production-ready applications and help shape the company's technical foundation. Candidates must currently live within commuting distance of New York City; remote and hybrid work are not available.

What you'll do

• Build, test, launch, and improve full-stack products from zero to one
• Develop modern frontend applications using React, Next.js, or similar technologies
• Build backend services, APIs, databases, and third-party integrations
• Create AI-powered features using large language models and multimodal models
• Build AI agents that can use tools, complete workflows, and interact with external systems
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, and knowledge systems
• Integrate voice AI, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or real-time conversational systems
• Implement structured outputs, tool calling, model routing, and human approval workflows
• Build evaluation, monitoring, and testing systems for AI performance
• Improve application reliability, scalability, security, latency, and AI inference costs
• Work directly with founders, users, and product stakeholders
• Help make product, architecture, and technology decisions

Required qualifications

• 4 or more years of professional software engineering experience
• Proven experience building and launching a product from zero to one
• Prior experience working at an early-stage startup
• Strong experience across frontend and backend development
• Strong skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and Next.js
• Backend experience with Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Go, or similar technologies
• Experience with PostgreSQL, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and production deployments
• Hands‑on experience integrating large language models into production applications
• Experience with AI agents, RAG, tool calling, embeddings, multimodal AI, or voice AI
• Strong product judgment and the ability to operate with limited direction
• Ability to move quickly while maintaining high engineering standards
• Must be actively hands‑on and writing production code
• Must currently live within commuting distance of New York City and be able to work onsite five days per week; remote, hybrid, relocation‑dependent, and out‑of‑area candidates will not be considered

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or open-source AI models
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol and agent orchestration frameworks
• Experience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK, or similar tools
• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, or pgvector
• Experience with Voice AI, WebSockets, WebRTC, or real‑time streaming systems
• Experience with AI evaluations, observability, prompt injection protection, and model security
• Experience with Docker, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or serverless infrastructure
• Experience as an early, founding, or first engineering hire

Why this role

This is an opportunity to work directly with founders on a fast-moving, early-stage AI startup, taking full ownership of building AI-native products from zero to one.