Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding engineer position at an early-stage AI startup bringing AI-powered workflows to hardware engineering teams in defense and medical device industries. You will own the full technical stack, partnering directly with the CTO to take the system from architecture through production, inside real customer programs. The work you ship will directly shape how experienced engineering teams operate, and every engineer hired after you will build on the foundation you set.
What You'll Do
Design and build the system 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: architecture decisions, production delivery, observability, evaluation suites, regression testing, and on-call operations.
Ship your first production AI workflow into a live customer program, one that engineers use and depend on regularly.
Build evaluation and training loops that improve the system using simulation runs, test data, engineer corrections, and field outcomes, including reinforcement learning grounded in real physics.
Spend time with engineers at partner companies, identify where the system fails against real deadlines, and turn those learnings into platform capabilities.
Contribute input to the product roadmap and execute on it quickly inside live engineering programs.
Expand the platform across multiple operating companies with measurable cycle-time reduction, while building and mentoring a small team.
What We're Looking For
4 or more years of shipping software to production, including systems that real customers depended on daily.
Proven experience putting AI into production: shipped LLM agent workflows that call real tools, handle failure gracefully, and are held to rigorous evaluation suites.
Strong Python skills and backend or ML systems engineering experience in production AI systems.
Experience at a high-growth or early-stage company with a fast-paced engineering culture.
Strong CS fundamentals, ideally from a rigorous academic or industry background.
Ability to design honest evaluations and judge when the right answer is retrieval, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or plain software.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to earn trust with experienced domain engineers on a shop floor.
Comfortable with travel to partner company sites and working fully in-person.
Background in frontier AI, applied AI, industrial software, simulation, CAD/CAE/EDA, or physical-world AI is a strong plus.
Experience with reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, or deployed AI systems iterated on real-world failure modes is a plus.
Authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship is required.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $150,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Equity is part of the package given the founding-team nature of this role. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
This is a full-time, on-site role based in New York City, NY. Regular travel to partner engineering companies is expected.