{"id":1869659,"url":"https://alion.io/job/people-in-ai-founding-engineer-2","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":3862080,"name":"People In AI","domain":"peopleinai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/people-in-ai","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":true,"employer_type":"agency","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Schema","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":180000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":180000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-22T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-24T11:58:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":94,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":94},"description":"Founding Engineer\n(Product, Data & Agentic AI)\nCompensation: $160,000-$180,000 base plus Equity\nLocation: New York City - hybrid, minimum three days per week in office\nThe Company\nA well-funded healthcare AI startup is building a revenue integrity platform for complex provider organisations. Its product brings fragmented contract, claims and payment data together to identify underpayments and support evidence-backed recovery through intelligent automation.\nThe founders combine deep healthcare operations, machine learning and early-stage company-building experience. Customer demand is developing quickly, making engineering capacity the company’s immediate priority.\nThe Opportunity\nThis is the first full-time engineering hire and one of the most important appointments the company will make. You will help establish the technical foundation, product quality bar and engineering culture that future hires inherit.\nThe role offers substantial hands-on ownership across data, AI systems, architecture and customer-facing product development, alongside meaningful early-stage equity.\nThe Role\nYou will own correctness across a product that turns messy financial and operational data into trusted, actionable recovery opportunities. Working directly with the CTO and customers, you will build systems that are technically robust, commercially useful and simple enough for non-technical users to trust.\nThis is not a narrowly defined backend, frontend or AI role. It is a founding product-engineering position for someone who wants to solve the highest-priority problem in front of the business.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild and scale data pipelines and integrations across contracts, claims, remittance and payment information.\n\nDesign systems that compare expected contractual payments with actual outcomes and surface valid recovery opportunities.\n\nDevelop and improve agentic workflows that assemble evidence, generate appeal materials and support recovery processes.\n\nCreate evaluation, validation and monitoring systems that identify model or agent failures before customers rely on the output.\n\nPartner directly with customers to understand operational problems and translate them into simple, low-touch product experiences.\n\nArchitect secure multi-tenant systems with appropriate data separation, encryption and access controls.\n\nHelp define engineering standards, review future technical work and shape the next several engineering hires.\n\nWhat You’ll Bring\nStrong senior-level experience building and owning production software systems.\n\nEvidence of shipping products to real customers, learning from failures and iterating quickly.\n\nExperience operating in an early-stage startup or another environment with significant ambiguity and individual ownership.\n\nA modern AI-enabled development workflow, combined with disciplined evaluation and validation of generated output.\n\nStrong product judgement and the ability to reduce technically complex workflows into clear user experiences.\n\nConfidence communicating with customers and stakeholders who may not be technical or immediately comfortable with AI.\n\nMentoring, technical leadership or early team-building experience is highly valued.\n\nWhat This Role Requires\nAt least four to five years of substantive senior or staff-calibre individual-contributor engineering experience.\n\nThe ability to make sound architectural decisions while remaining deeply hands-on.\n\nGenuine experience using AI tools and models to build faster, not simply surface-level familiarity.\n\nA willingness to work from the New York City office at least three days per week.\n\nThe ownership mindset required to investigate problems, develop solutions and move work forward without constant direction.\n\nTech Stack\nAgentic AI workflows and model evaluation\n\nData engineering and third-party integrations\n\nClaims, remittance and contract-processing systems\n\nSecure multi-tenant architecture\n\nEncryption, permissions and protected-data handling\n\nSpecific language, framework and infrastructure details will be discussed during the process.\n\nWhy Join\nBecome the first full-time engineer and directly shape the product, architecture, engineering culture and future team.\n\nSolve a technically complex, commercially valuable problem involving fragmented data, intelligent automation and highly trust-sensitive users.\n\nReceive meaningful percentage ownership at a well-funded early-stage company with active customer demand.\n\nAbout People in AI\nPeople in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4793,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-04T21:13:54Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.133,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":94,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:3","agency","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":180000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/people-in-ai-founding-engineer-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/people-in-ai-founding-engineer-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T14:51:08Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21030,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3862080},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3862080"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fpeople-in-ai-founding-engineer-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fpeople-in-ai-founding-engineer-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fpeople-in-ai-founding-engineer-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/people-in-ai-founding-engineer-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpeople-in-ai-founding-engineer-2"}]}