Founding Engineer

Location

Union Square, New York, NY

In-office 5 days per week in Union Square, NYC.

Compensation

$200,000 – $400,000 Base + Up to 2% Equity

Visa

US Citizens / Green Card Holders Only — No Visa Sponsorship or Transfers

Company Stage of Funding

Bootstrapped / Self-Funded — Founded 2024

Office Type

On-site — 5 days per week

Travel

Not specified

Company Description

We are a highly profitable, bootstrapped technology company building advanced pricing and market-making technology for the live event ticketing industry.

The platform operates similarly to a high-frequency trading firm for live event tickets, continuously pricing, bidding on, and managing live inventory across major ticket marketplaces. The systems are real-time, financially live, and mission-critical, with every improvement directly impacting the business.

The company has scaled from $0 to $80M in six months while remaining entirely self-funded, with a small cost basis and high margins. The engineering team is building classical machine learning systems using AI-native development workflows, with agentic AI powering research, evaluation, and production operations.

The team is extremely small, intellectually rigorous, and highly collaborative. This is an opportunity to become the first engineering hire and have direct ownership over core systems that operate at significant financial scale.

What You Will Do

• Build Core Platform Systems: Own the architecture and development of the pricing engine, bidding system, and data infrastructure powering real-time ticket trading.
• Design and build highly reliable, low-latency systems that continuously respond to live market conditions.
• Build AI Research Infrastructure: Design research pipelines that transform interactive, session-by-session model research into continuously running infrastructure.
• Build systems that allow models and strategies to be evaluated, iterated, and deployed continuously.
• Build A/B Testing Infrastructure: Develop experimentation frameworks for the pricing engine and use results to improve model performance and business outcomes.
• Optimize bidding system throughput and reliability across live ticket marketplaces.
• Build AI-Powered Operations: Develop automated systems for production triage, failure response, model monitoring, and drift detection.
• Apply agentic AI workflows to research, engineering, debugging, and operational processes.
• Build and maintain real-time data pipelines supporting pricing, bidding, model evaluation, and monitoring.
• Work across classical machine learning, AI/ML infrastructure, real-time systems, and data engineering.
• Make high-impact technical decisions as the first engineering hire and help establish engineering architecture, practices, and standards.
• Rapidly identify bottlenecks and build systems that improve the speed, reliability, and profitability of the platform.

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 3–10 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong experience building and shipping production software.
• Demonstrated ability to own systems end-to-end in fast-moving environments.
• Experience working in startups, small engineering teams, or environments with significant individual ownership.
• Strong track record of solving complex technical problems independently.
• Experience building systems where reliability, throughput, latency, or financial impact matter.
• Deep adoption of AI-native and agentic development workflows.

Technical Requirements

• Strong Python programming skills.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building production-grade systems and services.
• Experience with AI/ML systems or machine learning infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of data pipelines and data processing.
• Experience working with real-time systems.
• Ability to design scalable, reliable, and maintainable architectures.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving ability.

AI & Agentic Workflow Requirements

• Deep experience using AI coding and development tools as part of daily engineering workflows.
• Strong understanding of agentic AI workflows.
• Experience using AI agents for software development, research, testing, debugging, or operational automation.
• Ability to design systems where AI agents can continuously execute research or operational tasks.
• Experience integrating LLMs or AI agents into production workflows is highly preferred.
• Strong understanding of the limitations, failure modes, and evaluation requirements of AI-generated outputs.

Data, ML & Real-Time Systems Requirements

• Experience building or maintaining data pipelines.
• Familiarity with classical machine learning systems.
• Experience with model experimentation and evaluation.
• Experience building A/B testing or experimentation frameworks is highly preferred.
• Experience with real-time or event-driven systems.
• Understanding of monitoring, model drift, and production performance.
• Experience optimizing throughput, latency, or system efficiency.

Platform & Reliability Requirements

• Experience designing systems that operate reliably in production.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Experience building automated failure detection and response systems.
• Ability to reason about system performance and bottlenecks.
• Strong ownership of production systems and operational outcomes.
• Comfortable working on systems where failures can have immediate business or financial consequences.

Soft Skills

• Exceptional ownership and initiative.
• Founder mentality.
• Highly autonomous and comfortable being the first engineering hire.
• Strong bias toward action and shipping.
• Intellectually curious and highly analytical.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration.
• Willing to challenge assumptions and find better solutions.
• Comfortable moving between research, infrastructure, product, and operations.
• Highly motivated by measurable business impact.

Compensation & Benefits

• $200K – $400K base salary.
• Up to 2% equity.
• Opportunity to join as the first engineering hire.
• Direct ownership over critical systems and architecture.
• Opportunity to work on real-time ML and AI infrastructure.
• Work on a highly profitable, bootstrapped business operating at significant transaction volume.
• High level of autonomy and direct impact on business performance.

Why Join

• Become the first engineering hire and help define the entire technical foundation of the company.
• Work on systems where engineering improvements can impact the business within hours.
• Build real-time pricing, bidding, and data infrastructure operating at significant financial scale.
• Work at the intersection of classical ML, AI agents, data infrastructure, and real-time systems.
• Build AI-native research and operational infrastructure from the ground up.
• Have unusually high ownership over architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards.
• Join a highly profitable company that has demonstrated extraordinary growth without external funding.
• Work closely with a very small team where individual contributions have outsized impact.