Founding AI Engineer
Series A Fintech Startup (backed by Y Combinator)
New York, NY · Full-Time · $160,000 - $200,000/year + Equity
In-person (3-4 days/week in NYC office) · 3+ Years Experience
About the Role: We're building a consumer fintech app with AI-powered tools. We're hiring a Founding AI Engineer to own and evolve our core AI features. This role combines large language models, data integration, and product development to create smarter user experiences.
This is a full-stack, end-to-end ownership role. You'll work directly with the founding team.
Responsibilities:
- Own and ship AI features end-to-end, from whiteboard to production, across the full stack using AI coding agents as much as possible
- Own the architecture and development of AI systems powering core features
- Build and ship LLM-powered product features used by hundreds of thousands of users
- Design retrieval systems that ground model responses in relevant data and internal knowledge
- Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, reasoning accuracy, and safety
- Improve model performance, latency, and cost efficiency in production
- Build infrastructure for prompt orchestration, memory, and contextual personalization
- Design guardrails appropriate for financial products and regulated environments
- Pair with customers and internal teams to surface pain points and ship fixes fast
You Might Be a Fit If:
- You've built impressive solo or side projects or shipped production AI systems with real users
- You're hungry, curious, and comfortable with minimal structure
- You bias toward shipping: fast feedback, tight loops
- You have strong fundamentals in backend engineering and LLM systems
- You thrive in high-intensity environments and want a direct line to product decisions
What We Offer:
- High ownership, direct collaboration with the founding team from day one
- Hybrid work, three-four days per week in the New York office