Founding AI Engineer

 

Location: New York City, NY (Flatiron District)
Company Stage of Funding: Early-Stage Fintech
Office Type: Onsite — 5 Days/Week
Salary: $210,000–$250,000 Base + Equity
Employment Type: Full-Time

Company Description

Our client is a fintech technology company building a modern corporate access platform for investment banks and financial institutions.

The platform brings together CRM functionality, email communications, event management, reporting, and AI-powered meeting allocation to help financial institutions manage complex workflows more efficiently.

As the company expands its AI capabilities, it is looking for a Founding AI Engineer to build and deploy intelligent, agentic product features that enterprise financial customers can trust with real business operations.

This is a high-ownership opportunity to shape the company's AI architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction while working closely with its founders and product engineering team.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, and ship customer-facing LLM and agentic AI features into production.

• Own AI product development end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, evaluation, and ongoing improvement.

• Build reliable agent systems involving prompting, tool use, context management, and multi-step workflows.

• Develop evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and failure-handling mechanisms for production AI systems.

• Integrate frontier AI models into enterprise applications.

• Build backend APIs and services using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.

• Deploy and operate AI-powered applications using AWS infrastructure.

• Collaborate with product engineers to integrate AI capabilities into customer-facing applications.

• Design systems that meet the reliability and operational expectations of enterprise financial institutions.

• Establish technical patterns, development processes, and engineering standards for the company's growing AI capabilities.

• Work directly with engineering leadership to identify high-impact AI opportunities and deliver production-ready solutions.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 4+ years of professional backend engineering experience.

• Demonstrated experience shipping customer-facing LLM-powered features into production.

• Strong hands-on experience with frontier language models and their integration into real applications.

• Experience building agentic systems involving prompting, tool use, and context management.

• Understanding of production AI reliability, including evaluations, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.

• Strong Python backend engineering experience, ideally with FastAPI or Django.

• Experience developing and operating applications on AWS.

• Ability to independently own technically complex projects from architecture through production.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design capabilities.

• Experience collaborating with product engineers to deliver complete customer-facing features.

• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.

• Comfortable working in a small, high-ownership engineering team.

• Able to work onsite in New York City five days per week.

Preferred

• Previous experience as a founding engineer, early AI engineer, or senior individual contributor at a startup.

• Experience building production-grade AI agents that perform meaningful business tasks.

• Experience designing AI evaluation pipelines and regression testing frameworks.

• Familiarity with LLM orchestration, tool calling, and structured outputs.

• Experience with AI observability, monitoring, and production incident resolution.

• Background in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, or regulated industries.

• Experience transitioning from traditional machine learning into production LLM applications.

• Experience establishing technical architecture and engineering processes for new teams.

Compensation & Benefits

• $210,000–$250,000 base salary

• Equity compensation

• Significant ownership over the company's AI architecture and product capabilities

• Direct collaboration with the co-founder and CIO

• Opportunity to establish the foundation for a growing AI engineering function

• Hands-on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities

• Onsite work environment in Manhattan's Flatiron District

This opportunity is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building real AI products, solving challenging reliability problems, and taking founding-level ownership of systems used by enterprise customers.