AI Engineer

Solid software architecture: you can explain why a system is shaped the way it is, and spot when an agent’s design is going to hurt later.

• Strong PHP and Laravel: queues, jobs, the scheduler, events, and Eloquent without the N+1 drama.

• Real SQL skills (MySQL): schema design, indexing, migrations, reading query plans, and writing the query yourself.

• Debugging: logs, stack traces, Xdebug or similar, reproducing issues, and finding root causes, not just symptoms.

• Security and privacy best practices: authentication and authorization, input validation, encryption, least privilege, OWASP top risks, secrets handling.

The rest of the stack

• Vue and Tailwind on the front end.

• REST APIs: designing them and integrating with third-party ones.

• Redis for queues, caching, and locks.

• Cloud experience (AWS a plus).

• Testing with Pest or PHPUnit.

• CI/CD with GitHub Actions or similar.

• Admin panel tools like Laravel Nova or Filament.

How you work

• Initiative. You find the work instead of waiting for it.

• Ownership. If you shipped it (or your agents did), it’s yours to understand, fix, and improve.

• You work well in a small core: direct with our CTO, clear about your reasoning, and happy to explain it to an agent or to a person.

• You can show real, shipped work. We care about what you can do, not a years-of-experience number.

• You can commute to the Mahwah / Wyckoff area and want to be in the office.

Nice-to-haves

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi, or similar).

A modern web platform and internal tools that people actually enjoy using.

• Integrations and automation that connect systems and take busywork off people’s plates.

• AI-powered workflows, plus the agent setups, guardrails and review steps that let a small core build like a much bigger one.

• Secure, reliable, well-tested systems with healthcare-grade privacy and security baked in from day one.

What a week roughly looks like

No two weeks are the same, but expect a mix of:

• Agents running in parallel on branches while you review diffs, push back on bad code, and write the tricky parts yourself.

• Working through architecture and priorities with our CTO, then turning them into shipped code.

• Whiteboard sessions on new ideas, and turning the good ones into working prototypes.

• Digging into a weird bug by hand: logs, queries, a debugger, and some stubbornness.

• Spotting something nobody asked about (a slow query, a flaky job, a tool that would save us hours) and handling it.

• Showing what shipped, what broke, and what you want to try next.

Perks of the role (just for fun; these are about the job, not benefits)

• Founding member of the NJ office. You’ll help shape how it works.

• First dibs on the whiteboard.

• You pick the office coffee machine. Choose wisely.

• You get to name the agents.

• The CEO is one desk over, so your ideas get a fast yes or no.

• Your ideas don’t sit in a backlog for six months.

Must-haves

AI (front and center)

• You ship with AI coding agents daily: Cursor, the Grok ecosystem (including Grok Bot), and similar tools. You have a setup, opinions, and receipts.

• You’re current with today’s AI tools and how they’re changing month to month.

• You’ve built real agent workflows: task breakdown, parallel agents, prompt and agent orchestration, and review loops that catch bad output before it ships.

• You verify agent output: tests first, reading diffs line by line, and not trusting anything that just “looks right.”

• You keep sensitive data (customer information, secrets, credentials) out of prompts, logs, and tools that aren’t approved for it.

Fundamentals (you own the result)

• You can build and debug it yourself, without AI, when needed. Reading unfamiliar code, stepping through it, and fixing it by hand is normal for you.

I’m the CEO of Nu Image®, and we’re opening a new office in New Jersey. I’m looking for an AI engineer to be a founding member of it, and yes, the desk next to mine is open.

Here’s the setup. We’re building the next generation of our technology, and it’s a small, tight core: you, working directly with our CTO, with AI agents as the force multiplier. You’ll own the AI engineering and the hands-on code development.

AI agents do most of the typing here. But make no mistake: you’ll own the code, not just prompt it. You’ll understand the architecture, read every line the agents write, and be able to debug and fix it by hand when they get it wrong. When something breaks in production, “the agent wrote it” isn’t an answer. You are the builder, and the result is yours.

And here’s the line I care about most: I don’t want someone who waits to be told what to do. See a problem? Fix it. See a better way? Build it and show us. Initiative is the job.

If you’re the person at the meetup who can’t stop talking about your agent setup, and you can also explain what’s happening under the hood, keep reading.

Who we are

• Nu Image® is a US telehealth company. Founded in 2004, online since 2008.

• LegitScript certified, serving all 50 states.

• We’re opening a new office in the Mahwah / Wyckoff area of New Jersey. This role is based there, in person.