Founding Applied AI Engineer

Our client, a rapidly growing AI startup in the hospitality sector, is hiring a Founding Applied AI Engineer to join their team in New York. The successful candidate will play a key role in developing the platform, delivering AI applications into production and leading technical decisions, while also helping define the product roadmap and broader business strategy.

Responsibilities

• Build and launch end-to-end product features, spanning backend services, AI workflows and customer-facing React applications.
• Develop the systems that enable AI agents to operate effectively, including context handling, tool execution, orchestration, persistent state and human approvals.
• Create APIs, integrations and data pipelines linking point-of-sale, accounting, payroll and other business systems.
• Convert invoices, recipes, supplier catalogues and inventory records into accurate, structured data.
• Design evaluations around real customer workflows and diagnose issues across model outputs and tool interactions.
• Strengthen agent reliability through effective error recovery and escalation processes.
• Use production results to guide model selection and improve accuracy, completion rates, response times and operating costs.
• Engage with customers to understand their operational needs and translate feedback into practical product enhancements.
• Help shape system architecture, product priorities and engineering practices as the business grows.

Skillset

• Strong technical expertise in LLM and agentic applications, backend and data systems, or React product development.
• Proficiency in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, with a willingness to develop across both.
• Experience delivering production AI agents, including tool integration, context management, persistent state, error recovery and evaluations.
• An understanding of different AI models and providers, and how their strengths and limitations influence architecture and performance.
• Experience developing and operating cloud applications on AWS, GCP, Azure or similar platforms.
• A track record of building substantial software and explaining the technical decisions behind it; startup work, personal projects and open-source contributions are welcome.
• Experience building data pipelines and working with SQL or document databases to manage incomplete or inconsistent information.
• Strong engineering practices, including version control, maintainable code, effective testing and systematic debugging.
• A product-focused mindset, with the initiative to understand customer needs, challenge assumptions and take ownership of delivery.

Benefits

• Salary: $150k - $225k.
• Equity.