Senior Software Engineer (AI) (New York City Metropolitan Area)

Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Compensation: $200,000–$250,000 base + equity

Location: New York City — hybrid

Employment Type: Full-time

Join a two-person Applied AI team as engineer #3, building agents that take real actions across complex financial systems.

This fast-growing fintech is modernizing a huge private-markets industry still heavily reliant on spreadsheets, manual workflows, and outsourced administration.

The opportunity combines the best of both worlds: a tiny Applied AI team with startup-level ownership, sitting inside a more established engineering organization with years of core infrastructure already built.

That foundation includes complex business logic, workflow systems, structured financial data, query layers, and caching infrastructure. The Applied AI team is now building agentic products on top of those rails.

There’s no mature AI playbook or predefined roadmap to simply execute against. You’ll help define the architecture, product direction, engineering standards, and what high-quality production AI looks like across the business — while benefiting from the platform, domain expertise, and engineering support of the wider organization.

What You’ll Do

• Build and productionize customer-facing AI agents that perform real operational work
• Enable agents to safely access data, use tools, and execute workflows
• Own projects end to end, from ambiguous customer problems through design, implementation, and production
• Define standards around evals, monitoring, reliability, and failure handling
• Work across backend systems, product, infrastructure, and AI
• Partner directly with customers, engineering leadership, and domain experts

What You’ll Bring

• A track record as a high-impact Senior or Staff engineer, demonstrated through rapid progression, major system ownership, or standout contribution
• Deep backend and system design fundamentals
• Experience building, scaling, and debugging production systems where reliability matters
• High agency — you can identify the problem, shape the solution, and drive it through production
• Comfort operating without a fully defined roadmap or strict engineering boundaries
• Experience across both high-scale engineering environments and smaller, fast-moving teams is a strong plus
• Strong interest in LLMs, agents, and modern AI systems

Production AI experience is useful, but not required. The team is more interested in exceptional software engineers who understand how robust systems are built than candidates whose main credential is an “AI Engineer” title.

Why Join?

• Be the third engineer on a brand-new Applied AI team
• Get startup-level ownership without joining an organization from zero
• Build on top of mature, complex infrastructure already used across the business
• Take on one of the highest-impact engineering hires in the company
• Shape architecture, product patterns, evaluation standards, and roadmap from the ground up
• Build agents that perform meaningful work — not just answer questions
• Work directly with customers and company leadership
• Join a culture that rewards engineers who think like owners, not ticket-takers

About People In AI

People In AI connects exceptional AI, Machine Learning, Data, and Software Engineering talent with ambitious technology companies.