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# Founding AI Engineer

- **Company:** Recruiting from Scratch
- **Location:** New York, NY, United States
- **Experience:** Experienced
- **Salary:** $210,000.0 - $250,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** AI Evaluation, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Software Applications, Django Web Framework, Python (Programming Language), Machine Learning, Language Modeling, Software Product Management, Regression Testing, Enterprise Software Applications, Large Language Models, Backend, Fastapi, Machine Learning Operations, Web Api
- **Published:** November 7, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/founding-ai-engineer-ny--d0e7e28b-fb63-4907-bd6e-405fd97e51a5

## About the Role

* 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.

## Description

* 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.