Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer
$240,000–$300,000 base + equity
New York City (Hybrid)

About the Company
A seed-stage, venture-backed startup building an AI-native platform transforming a legacy, highly regulated financial services workflow. The company is tackling a critical, trillion-dollar decision-making process currently dominated by opaque, manual systems, bringing transparency, automation, and modern infrastructure to an industry overdue for disruption.

The Mission
This team is reimagining how institutional decisions are powered, leveraging cutting-edge AI to extract, structure, and interpret complex unstructured data at scale. By combining NLP, customizable policy engines, and robust data infrastructure, they are building a platform that delivers auditable, high-precision insights to sophisticated end users operating in regulated environments.

The Role
This is a true 0 to 1 opportunity. As the first engineering hire, you will lead the design and build of the entire platform from architecture to deployment, working directly with the founders. You will operate as both an individual contributor and technical leader, shaping the product, infrastructure, and future engineering team.
This role requires someone who has personally built and shipped applied AI systems from scratch, not just contributed to them. You will thrive in ambiguity, own critical technical decisions, and take a product from concept to market.

What You’ll Do
Design and build the end-to-end platform architecture from the ground up
Develop NLP and ML systems for large-scale document parsing, classification, and recommendation generation
Build data ingestion pipelines for structured and unstructured financial datasets
Create a flexible policy engine to support customizable logic and decision frameworks
Design and implement APIs for internal systems and client-facing products
Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and reliability
Implement security, compliance, and auditability best practices
Partner closely with founders to translate complex domain problems into scalable systems
Hire and mentor future engineers as the team grows

What You’ll Bring
Strong software engineering experience with backend and systems design expertise
Proven experience building and shipping AI-driven products from 0 to 1
Deep proficiency in Python
Strong experience with NLP, transformer-based models, and classification systems
Ability to operate independently and define technical direction in ambiguous environments
Experience designing scalable APIs and distributed systems
Cloud expertise (AWS preferred) and infrastructure automation experience
Strong communication skills, comfortable engaging with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Tech Stack
Python
NLP and transformer models
AWS (cloud infrastructure)
Data pipelines and ingestion frameworks
API design and backend systems

Why Join?
True ownership, be the first engineer and shape the technical foundation
High-impact problem space with real-world financial implications
Work directly with experienced, high-caliber founders
Build in a greenfield environment with no legacy constraints
Competitive compensation plus meaningful equity upside
Opportunity to scale into a leadership role as the team grows

About People In AI
People In AI is a specialist search firm focused on building world-class AI and engineering teams. We partner with high-growth startups and leading AI organizations to connect exceptional talent with impactful opportunities across applied AI, machine learning, and infrastructure.
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