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 platform for professional investors in the healthcare sector. You will be one of the first engineers on a three-person team, owning infrastructure, agentic systems, and the full stack end to end. Your work will directly shape how the product is built and how reliably it serves institutional investors.
What You'll Do
Ship across the full stack: frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.
Build data pipelines and internal tools that let analysts add new sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.
Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and dependable in production.
Own work end to end: inspecting data, QA, instrumentation, shipping, and fixing issues in production.
In your first 30 days: integrate a new data source, improve system speed or reliability, build a company ontology, and ship the first version of a core product module.
What We're Looking For
2 to 7 years of professional experience building, shipping, and operating production systems end to end.
Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI or LLM-based applications in production.
Full-stack capability: Python backend (FastAPI or equivalent), TypeScript, and React frontend.
Data infrastructure and pipeline development: ETL, data modeling, and SQL.
Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database.
Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.
AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment experience.
Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates.
Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic logic is the right call.
Deep ownership mentality and comfort with ambiguity on a small, fast-moving team.
US citizenship required; no visa sponsorship available.
Bonus: capital markets, equity research, or broader financial services domain experience.
Bonus: familiarity with modern data tools such as dbt, columnar stores, or vector databases.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $156,000 to $182,000 USD annually. No visa sponsorship available.
Location
On-site in New York City, NY, five days per week. Candidates must be local or willing to relocate.