{"id":3582607,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rheaction-founding-ai-engineer","title":"Founding AI Engineer","company":{"id":4424424,"name":"Rheaction","domain":"rheaction.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/rheaction","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Manatal","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":165000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-01T05:11:08Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-01","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T09:29:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"Location: San Francisco, CA - In-person (5 days/week)\nEmployment: Full-time\nExperience: 3-8 years\nCompensation: $165,000-$210,000 + 0.75%-2% equity\nWork Authorization: Must have existing U.S. work authorization without sponsorship.\nAbout the Role\nWe're looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help build and scale advanced AI-powered products at an early-stage startup.\nYou'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.\nThis 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.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign, build, and optimize AI agents and multimodal AI workflows.\nImprove model accuracy, reliability, and performance through evaluations, experimentation, and model optimization.\nDevelop and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure AI system quality.\nWork with LLMs, computer vision, and other AI technologies to solve complex problems.\nBuild supporting data pipelines, internal tools, and production infrastructure.\nContribute across backend engineering, product development, and AI infrastructure as needed.\nMake architectural decisions and take ownership of core technical components.\nCollaborate directly with users to understand problems and improve product capabilities.\nWhat We're Looking For\n3-8 years of software engineering experience.\nStrong proficiency in Python and solid software engineering fundamentals.\nHands-on experience developing AI-powered applications, agents, or LLM-based systems.\nExperience with model evaluations, performance optimization, and experimentation.\nFamiliarity with multimodal AI, computer vision, or advanced LLM workflows.\nAbility to design and own production-quality systems.\nExperience using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor or Claude Code.\nHigh ownership, strong problem-solving ability, and comfort with ambiguity.\nAbility to work independently in a fast-moving startup environment.\nStrong Plus\nExperience with post-training, fine-tuning, or model optimization.\nBuilding and evaluating multimodal or agentic AI systems.\nComputer vision or visual reasoning applications.\nExperience building AI products from 01.\nPrevious founding engineer or early-stage startup 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