Founding Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage AI company building a platform for commercial real estate portfolio research and operations. As the first dedicated engineering hire, you will work closely with the CTO and domain experts to turn client needs into production software with substantial ownership. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and own a portfolio research and chat interface for querying enterprise data, generating work products, and conducting analysis. - Design and ship reliable agentic workflows, including structured extraction, tool calling, and 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 deliver features from discovery through production. - Partner with the CTO to develop deep platform expertise and take independent ownership of your area. 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, plus familiarity with TypeScript, React, and AWS. - Hands-on experience building LLM agents, tool-calling systems, and multi-step AI workflows, including managing nondeterminism and context. - Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation and experience designing relational data models for complex, hierarchical information. - Experience building B2B AI products or document-processing systems, and shipping production software in a high-stakes B2B environment. - Ability to own platform features end-to-end, communicate proactively, and work effectively with limited specifications. 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.