Founding Software Engineer

The Role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Act as an early, senior-level product engineer who owns features from first concept through production. Build customer-facing applications and the backend services behind them, with a focus on AI-driven automation that can be trusted. Work directly with customers to gather requirements and help shape the roadmap.

What You'll Do

• Build new functionality end to end, from the backend logic to the user interface people use every day.
• Own the underlying framework that lets AI-driven automation manage context, coordinate tasks, keep state and request human sign-off on important actions.
• Develop backend APIs, third-party integrations, background jobs and data pipelines that turn messy inputs into clean, reliable data.
• Make automated AI features dependable through evaluations based on real workflows, failure tracing, recovery and escalation paths, and model choices informed by production results.
• Build polished web interfaces with React alongside the backend services that power them.
• Speak with customers, gather requirements and, where needed, take ownership of customer-specific workflows.
• Learn from production usage and contribute to the roadmap and strategic decisions.

What We're Looking For

• 1 to 3 years of software engineering experience, with strength in product engineering using React and/or LLM-based applications.
• Solid fundamentals in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, and willingness to become productive in both.
• Hands-on experience launching autonomous AI features into production, including building and debugging the supporting framework.
• Experience working across multiple model providers.
• A substantial project you can discuss in depth, including architecture, trade-offs, limitations and what you would change.
• Close attention to messy details such as missing data, duplicates, unexpected inputs and confusing user experiences.
• Founder mindset with strong ownership, agency and comfort turning vague problems into finished work.
• Good product intuition and taste, with care for the reasons behind what gets built.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working directly with customers.
• Early-stage startup experience is strongly preferred.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with retrieval techniques, data modeling, and evaluation, tracing, cost and permissions practices.
• Experience as a founder or building something real.

Benefits

• Health, dental and medical coverage

Location and Work Model

• New York, NY, United States
• On-site
• Full-time

Compensation, as the Posting Describes It

• Equity