Founding AI Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA - In-person (5 days/week)

Employment: Full-time

Experience: 3-8 years

Compensation: $165,000-$210,000 + 0.75%-2% equity

Work Authorization: Must have existing U.S. work authorization without sponsorship.

About the Role

We're looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help build and scale advanced AI-powered products at an early-stage startup.

You'll work at the intersection of AI engineering, multimodal models, agentic systems, and product development, with significant ownership over technical architecture, model performance, and production systems.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, experimenting with emerging AI technologies, and building products from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and optimize AI agents and multimodal AI workflows.
• Improve model accuracy, reliability, and performance through evaluations, experimentation, and model optimization.
• Develop and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure AI system quality.
• Work with LLMs, computer vision, and other AI technologies to solve complex problems.
• Build supporting data pipelines, internal tools, and production infrastructure.
• Contribute across backend engineering, product development, and AI infrastructure as needed.
• Make architectural decisions and take ownership of core technical components.
• Collaborate directly with users to understand problems and improve product capabilities.

What We're Looking For

• 3-8 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python and solid software engineering fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience developing AI-powered applications, agents, or LLM-based systems.
• Experience with model evaluations, performance optimization, and experimentation.
• Familiarity with multimodal AI, computer vision, or advanced LLM workflows.
• Ability to design and own production-quality systems.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor or Claude Code.
• High ownership, strong problem-solving ability, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Ability to work independently in a fast-moving startup environment.

Strong Plus

• Experience with post-training, fine-tuning, or model optimization.
• Building and evaluating multimodal or agentic AI systems.
• Computer vision or visual reasoning applications.
• Experience building AI products from 01.
• Previous founding engineer or early-stage startup experience.
• Experience developing internal AI tooling and automated engineering workflows.