Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is the first engineering hire at an early-stage AI company building systems that make hardware engineering move at the speed of software. You'll partner directly with the co-founder and CTO to own the full technical stack - from architecture through production - and your work will directly shape how defense and medical device companies ship products faster.
What You'll Do
Design and build the core architecture that integrates AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tools, while meeting the security requirements of defense and medical customers.
Own end-to-end engineering execution: design decisions, production delivery, observability, eval suites, regression testing, and on-call operations.
Ship your first production AI workflow into a live customer program - one that engineers use weekly and depend on daily.
Build evaluation and training loops that improve the system from simulation runs, test data, engineer corrections, and field outcomes, including reinforcement learning grounded in real physics.
Sit alongside engineers at partner companies, identify where the system fails under real deadlines, and convert those learnings into platform capabilities.
Contribute to roadmap decisions and execute on them reliably inside active engineering programs.
Scale the platform across multiple operating companies and help build and mentor the small team that follows you.
What We're Looking For
4+ years shipping software in production, including systems that real customers depended on daily.
Proven track record deploying LLM agent workflows that call real tools, handle failure gracefully, and are held to rigorous eval suites.
Strong Python and backend or ML systems engineering skills; comfort picking the right tool for the job.
Hands-on experience with observability, evaluation frameworks, regression testing, and on-call operations for production AI systems.
Ability to design and honestly judge evaluations - knowing when to reach for retrieval, fine-tuning, RL, or plain software.
Excellent communicator who can earn trust on a shop floor and absorb domain expertise from experienced engineers.
Comfortable with regular travel to partner facilities and working in-person in New York City.
Nice to have: experience with CAD, CAE, EDA, or PLM tools; background in frontier AI, robotics, autonomous systems, or industrial software; prior RL or fine-tuning in production.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $150,000 - $220,000 USD annually
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
Full-time, on-site in New York City, NY. Regular travel to partner engineering sites is expected.