Founding AI Engineer (New York City Metropolitan Area)

About the Opportunity

We’re partnering with an early-stage, research-driven AI startup building the infrastructure, tools, and platforms that help advance the capabilities of frontier AI systems.

The company works at the intersection of AI research and engineering, developing systems that enable AI agents to interact with software, navigate digital environments, and perform increasingly complex, multi-step tasks. Its technology supports teams working at the forefront of AI development, helping turn research objectives into practical tools, scalable infrastructure, and measurable improvements in model performance.

As a Founding AI Engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to shape both the technical direction and engineering culture of a growing organization. You’ll work closely with a highly technical team to build foundational systems, translate emerging research needs into production-ready solutions, and tackle engineering challenges that don’t yet have established playbooks.

This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys working in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment where research, experimentation, and hands-on development go hand in hand.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and scale foundational AI systems, tools, and infrastructure that support the development and evaluation of advanced AI agents.
• Translate complex research objectives into practical engineering solutions, including software environments, automated workflows, data pipelines, and evaluation systems.
• Develop reliable, scalable platforms and services that support large volumes of concurrent AI-driven workloads.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to create the infrastructure needed to experiment with, evaluate, and improve AI model capabilities.
• Contribute across the technology stack, identifying opportunities to improve system performance, reliability, usability, and scalability.
• Work directly with technical stakeholders to understand emerging needs and rapidly develop solutions to challenging, open-ended problems.
• Help establish engineering standards, architectural decisions, and development practices as the company grows.
• Take ownership of projects from initial concept through implementation, iteration, and deployment.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building complex, reliable systems.
• Experience developing AI-powered applications, infrastructure, developer tools, or other technically sophisticated software products.
• Ability to navigate ambiguous problems, break down complex requirements, and deliver practical solutions in rapidly evolving environments.
• Comfort working across different areas of the technology stack and adapting to changing technical priorities.
• A strong sense of ownership, with the ability to move between high-level architectural thinking and hands-on implementation.
• Curiosity about AI research and a desire to help translate emerging capabilities into useful, real-world systems.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with highly technical teammates.
• Ability to work onsite in New York City and collaborate closely with a highly technical, fast-moving team.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with LLMs, AI agents, model evaluation, or AI training workflows.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, scalable infrastructure, data generation, or automated testing and evaluation.
• Experience building developer platforms, APIs, internal tooling, or complex software environments.
• Exposure to machine learning research, reinforcement learning, or systems designed to improve model capabilities.
• Experience at an early-stage startup or in a research-intensive engineering environment.

Why Join?

• Foundational impact: Help shape the architecture, technical direction, and engineering culture of an early-stage AI company.
• Cutting-edge problems: Work on challenging systems at the intersection of software engineering and frontier AI research.
• Broad technical ownership: Contribute to foundational infrastructure, research tooling, and AI-enabled applications rather than being limited to a narrow technical area.
• Close collaboration: Work alongside researchers and engineers tackling some of the most challenging problems in AI development.
• Room to build: Help establish the systems, practices, and technical foundations that will support the company’s next stage of growth.

If you’re an engineer who thrives on difficult technical problems, enjoys building from first principles, and wants to contribute to the infrastructure shaping the next generation of AI systems, we’d love to connect.