Founding Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage AI company building software for commercial real estate. As the first dedicated engineering hire, you will work closely with the CTO and a small team to develop AI-powered portfolio research and operational workflows for institutional real estate owners. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and own a portfolio research and chat interface for querying data, generating work products, and running multi-step analyses. - Design and ship agentic workflows, including structured extraction, tool calling, and reliable multi-step AI pipelines. - Develop production infrastructure for LLM systems, including evaluations, observability, context construction, structured outputs, and failure handling. - Work with clients and domain experts to identify automation opportunities and turn ideas into production features. - Partner with the CTO to develop deep ownership of a platform area and deliver features end to end. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - One to three years of experience as a software engineer, founding engineer, or founding AI engineer, with a four-year degree. - Strong backend engineering skills in Python, along with experience using TypeScript, React, and AWS. - Hands-on experience building LLM agents, tool-calling systems, multi-step AI workflows, and reliable architectures that address nondeterminism and context management. - Experience designing relational data models for complex, hierarchical data, and a solid understanding of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). - Background building B2B AI products or document-processing systems at scale, and shipping production software in high-stakes B2B environments. - Ability to own platform features end to end, work with limited specifications, and communicate proactively. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary: $165,000 to $185,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site, five days per week in New York, New York.