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Founding Engineer

Up to $250K + equity New York, NY On-site Consumer AI Profitable 1-10 people

About the role

You will join a profitable consumer AI company in New York as one of its first engineers. Its chat and agent app is used by real people every day, and the founders need a builder who can own the core of the product with them. The team works fully in person in New York at an intense, all-in early-stage pace, and values output and high agency over pedigree.


What You'll Do

  • Build and improve the core agent harness: tool use, memory, system prompts, retrieval and evaluations.
  • Own features across the consumer chat app and backend, from architecture through launch and iteration.
  • Work with the founders to bring chat, agents, tools and apps together into one simple product.
  • Give agents more capable tooling, including their own compute environments.
  • Scale backend and database infrastructure for much larger usage.
  • Fine-tune and serve efficient open-source models on the company's own infrastructure.
  • Balance latency, cost, reliability and privacy across the product.


Who You Are

  • Have built and shipped your own product with measurable results: users, revenue or adoption.
  • Have built an agent harness hands-on (tool calling, memory, system prompts), beyond calling an LLM SDK.
  • Have hands-on experience serving, fine-tuning or evaluating open-source LLMs.
  • Bring 1 to 5 years of hands-on engineering, at a startup or through sustained independent or open-source work.
  • Keep a public GitHub with personal projects and a consistent, recent commit history.
  • Communicate clearly and own whatever lands on your plate in a small, in-person team.
  • Bonus: Founding or early engineer at an applied-AI or consumer startup.


Tech Stack

Python, open-source LLMs, LLM serving and fine-tuning, agent frameworks, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation, PostgreSQL, cloud infrastructure


Why You'll Thrive

  • Join as one of the first engineers and work directly with the founders every day.
  • Own the agent harness, the top priority from day one.
  • Ship to a consumer product that real people use every day.
  • Earn up to $250K base plus equity at a profitable company.
  • Open to candidates on OPT or needing an H-1B transfer.