Founding Engineer
About the Role
A founding engineer role within a Series A/B level AI hardware software startup focused on accelerating how engineering teams work with AI and engineering tools. You will own the technical execution end to end and directly influence product direction and customer delivery in close collaboration with leadership.
What You'll Do
Design and implement the architecture that integrates AI agents with CAD, CAE, PLM tools, and historical engineering data, while meeting security requirements for defense and medical applications.
Own end to end software delivery including design decisions, production readiness, observability, testing, and on call operations.
Deploy production AI workflows into live customer programs used on a regular basis.
Build evaluation and training loops to improve the system from simulations, data, and real-world feedback, including physics-informed reinforcement learning.
Collaborate with engineers at customer sites to identify failure points and translate learnings into platform capabilities.
Influence the product roadmap and translate it into reliable, scalable features for real engineering programs.
Scale the platform across multiple operating companies while mentoring a small team.
What We're Looking For
4+ years shipping production software, with experience on systems relied upon by real customers.
Proven track record shipping AI in production and building robust evaluation suites for LLM-based workflows.
Strong Python and backend or ML systems engineering skills; able to choose the right tool for the job.
Ability to design rigorous evaluations and decide when to use retrieval, fine tuning, reinforcement learning, or traditional software approaches.
Experience in frontier or applied AI, physical-world AI, industrial software, simulation, CAD/CAE/EDA, or related domains.
Excellent cross functional communication and ability to gain trust with engineers and customers on the shop floor.
Willingness to travel to customer sites and operating companies as needed.
Footprint in a hands-on, high standards founding environment with a bias to execution.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: 150,000 to 220,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
Primary location: New York, New York, United States. This is an on site role based in New York City.