Founding Engineer

David Joseph & Company
New York, NY, United States
about 1 month ago

Role details

Contract type
Internship / Graduate position
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience required
0 years minimum
Compensation
$175,000.0 - $250,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours
Job source

Tech stack

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) Artificial Intelligence Databases Github Python (Programming Language) Software Engineering TypeScript Large Language Models Backend Front End Software Development Virtual Agents

Job description

A Founding Engineer working primarily on the new AI CFO agent, with tech-lead-level autonomy from day one. You’ll join a small, technical team with no dedicated product person, giving you outsized influence over what gets built. Time split is roughly 75% new AI agent work / 25% existing lending infrastructure. Primarily backend Python with exposure to TypeScript frontend. No customer-facing work or formal product ownership.

What you’ll be doing

  • Build and extend the AI CFO agent’s tool surface so it can complete tasks that currently take a CFO or CEO an hour or more
  • Improve agent trajectory quality, and the breadth and depth of tools, so the agent reliably ships end-to-end outcomes
  • Compose existing scoped tools and build new ones (email composition, document filling, payload generation, account integrations)
  • Contribute to the underlying infrastructure both the lending and AI agent businesses sit on top of
  • Operate as a tech lead from day one: ramp fast, own delivery, work in a Slack-native, AI-tool-heavy development cycle

Tech stack: Python (backend - APIs, async, databases, cloud deployment); TypeScript (frontend); LLM tool-calling / agentic systems

Requirements

Do you have experience in Tooling?, * 0-5 years engineering, hard cap at 5

  • Excellence signal: notable startup, big tech, or top university CS
  • Python backend fundamentals
  • AI-native: Claude Code, Codex daily
  • Self-motivated tech lead, ramps fast
  • NYC in-person

Green Flags

  • Notable startup or big tech background showing the candidate cleared a real bar to get in (high-clout internships count). Confirms execution under pressure.
  • Top university CS or technical degree paired with active engineering signal (GitHub, side projects, hackathon wins).
  • Quant or HFT engineering background. Matches the existing team profile (both current devs are ex-HFT).
  • AI-native daily usage of Claude Code, Codex, or comparable. Has strong opinions on agent tool design.
  • Socialized, high-energy engineer who is excited about the product, not just a backend dev who wants to talk only to a database., * Indie-dev-only background without notable startup, big tech, or top university signal. Hard to differentiate from low-clout AI-note-taker-tier work.
  • More than 5 years of experience.
  • Zero-to-one experience but no users, no story to tell, no demonstrable shipping signal.
  • Resume polish without excellence markers: mid-university + unrelated experience + no notable inflection point.
  • Wants spoon-feeding or detailed scope handoff. Cannot operate as tech lead from day one.

About the company

An AI-native fintech lender that originated over $100M in funding to consumer brands in its first year by building novel in-house infrastructure - loan management systems, payment rails, and financial-data analysis. The company is now building the product that infrastructure was designed to power: an AI CFO agent that automates a brand’s entire financial stack (deductions, email workflows, accounting and banking data). The agent renders an opinionated, real-time-mutating UI through LLM tool calls and improves continuously from its own outputs.

Founded 2025 · ~9 people · Industry: FinTech, * Outsized ownership on a small team with no dedicated product person - you shape what gets built and how

  • A real data moat: deep financial data, direct customer relationships, and real-world workflows the agent automates
  • Frontier agent work on a self-improving AI CFO agent, inspired by Claude Code’s architecture

Apply for this position

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Apply on indeed.com

Good distractions

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