Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding engineering role at a Y Combinator-backed, seed-stage AI fintech startup building an AI-native financial research terminal for the healthcare sector. You'll be the third person on the team, working directly with the founders to architect and ship the core infrastructure, agentic systems, and data pipelines that power the product. The work you do here will define how the platform scales.
What You'll Do
Work across the full stack - shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.
Build data pipelines and internal tools that help analysts onboard new sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.
Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable at processing complex financial data.
Own work end to end: inspecting data, QA-ing what you build, instrumenting it, shipping it, and fixing it in production.
In your first 30 days: add a new information source, improve agentic system speed or reliability, and build a company ontology with a first-version data feature.
What We're Looking For
2+ years of hands-on experience building, shipping, and operating production systems end to end.
Practical experience building and deploying agentic AI or LLM-based applications in production.
Full-stack capability: Python backend (FastAPI or equivalent), TypeScript/React frontend, and data pipeline development.
Strong data infrastructure skills - ETL, data modeling, SQL, and PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, deployment, and production observability/debugging.
Familiarity with real-time or streaming data systems.
Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic software is the right tool.
Deep ownership mentality - you want accountability for the whole result, not just a slice of it.
Bonus: capital markets, equity research, or investment banking domain experience.
Bonus: experience with modern data tools (dbt, columnar/vector databases), edge computing infrastructure, or AI/ML system abstractions.
Must be authorized to work in the US; visa sponsorship is not available.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $156,000 - $182,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site in New York, NY.