Founding Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

New York City, NY · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $175,000–$250,000 + meaningful equity

About the Company

An AI-native fintech lender that originated over $100M in funding to consumer brands in its first year by building novel in-house infrastructure — loan management systems, payment rails, and financial-data analysis. The company is now building the product that infrastructure was designed to power: an AI CFO agent that automates a brand's entire financial stack (deductions, email workflows, accounting and banking data). The agent renders an opinionated, real-time-mutating UI through LLM tool calls and improves continuously from its own outputs.

Founded 2025 · ~9 people · Industry: FinTech

The Role

A Founding Engineer working primarily on the new AI CFO agent, with tech-lead-level autonomy from day one. You'll join a small, technical team with no dedicated product person, giving you outsized influence over what gets built. Time split is roughly 75% new AI agent work / 25% existing lending infrastructure. Primarily backend Python with exposure to TypeScript frontend. No customer-facing work or formal product ownership.

What you'll be doing

• Build and extend the AI CFO agent's tool surface so it can complete tasks that currently take a CFO or CEO an hour or more
• Improve agent trajectory quality, and the breadth and depth of tools, so the agent reliably ships end-to-end outcomes
• Compose existing scoped tools and build new ones (email composition, document filling, payload generation, account integrations)
• Contribute to the underlying infrastructure both the lending and AI agent businesses sit on top of
• Operate as a tech lead from day one: ramp fast, own delivery, work in a Slack-native, AI-tool-heavy development cycle

Tech stack: Python (backend — APIs, async, databases, cloud deployment); TypeScript (frontend); LLM tool-calling / agentic systems

Requirements

• 0-5 years engineering, hard cap at 5
• Excellence signal: notable startup, big tech, or top university CS
• Python backend fundamentals
• AI-native: Claude Code, Codex daily
• Self-motivated tech lead, ramps fast
• NYC in-person

Green Flags

• Notable startup or big tech background showing the candidate cleared a real bar to get in (high-clout internships count). Confirms execution under pressure.
• Top university CS or technical degree paired with active engineering signal (GitHub, side projects, hackathon wins).
• Quant or HFT engineering background. Matches the existing team profile (both current devs are ex-HFT).
• AI-native daily usage of Claude Code, Codex, or comparable. Has strong opinions on agent tool design.
• Socialized, high-energy engineer who is excited about the product, not just a backend dev who wants to talk only to a database.

Red Flags

• Indie-dev-only background without notable startup, big tech, or top university signal. Hard to differentiate from low-clout AI-note-taker-tier work.
• More than 5 years of experience.
• Zero-to-one experience but no users, no story to tell, no demonstrable shipping signal.
• Resume polish without excellence markers: mid-university + unrelated experience + no notable inflection point.
• Wants spoon-feeding or detailed scope handoff. Cannot operate as tech lead from day one.

Why Join

• Outsized ownership on a small team with no dedicated product person — you shape what gets built and how
• A real data moat: deep financial data, direct customer relationships, and real-world workflows the agent automates
• Frontier agent work on a self-improving AI CFO agent, inspired by Claude Code's architecture