Founding Engineer (Consumer AI Startup)

A consumer AI startup with a big, rapidly growing daily audience is hiring founding engineers for its compact, quick-moving, in-person team. It needs builders with strong backend or full-stack ability and real depth in applied AI who will take on whatever the product demands.

What the job involves

• Build and improve the heart of the agent framework, covering system prompts, tool calling, retrieval, memory and evaluations, which is priority number one
• Own features throughout the chat product for consumers and its backend, from early design to launch and subsequent iteration
• Collaborate alongside the founders on folding tools, agents and chat plus a growing catalog of apps into a single simple, enjoyable AI product
• Extend agent abilities by providing virtual machines and richer tooling, and scale the backend and databases for a vastly larger user base
• Help bring up and tune newly purchased GPU capacity, including adapting open-source models and serving the efficient ones
• Weigh user experience, privacy, reliability, cost and latency against each other, and contribute to ambitious future projects

Who fits

• One to five years of hands-on engineering, either at a startup or through sustained independent or open-source work
• Real agent-harness experience that goes beyond calling an LLM SDK
• Hands-on work with open-source LLMs, whether serving, fine-tuning or evaluation
• Launched personal projects with measurable results such as users or revenue
• A public GitHub with consistent, recent commits, and strong communication skills
• A plus: consumer product sense and a stint as founding engineer at a startup applying AI

On-site in New York, NY. Visa transfers considered.