Founding Engineer
About The Role
This is the first engineering hire at an early-stage AI company building systems that make hardware engineering move at the speed of software. You'll partner directly with the co-founder and CTO to own the full technical stack — from architecture through production — and your work will directly shape how defense and medical device companies ship products faster.
What You'll Do
Full-time, on-site in New York City, NY. Regular travel to partner engineering sites is expected.
This is the first engineering hire at an early-stage AI company building systems that make hardware engineering move at the speed of software. You'll partner directly with the co-founder and CTO to own the full technical stack — from architecture through production — and your work will directly shape how defense and medical device companies ship products faster.
What You'll Do
- Design and build the core architecture that integrates AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tools, while meeting the security requirements of defense and medical customers.
- Own end-to-end engineering execution: design decisions, production delivery, observability, eval suites, regression testing, and on-call operations.
- Ship your first production AI workflow into a live customer program — one that engineers use weekly and depend on daily.
- Build evaluation and training loops that improve the system from simulation runs, test data, engineer corrections, and field outcomes, including reinforcement learning grounded in real physics.
- Sit alongside engineers at partner companies, identify where the system fails under real deadlines, and convert those learnings into platform capabilities.
- Contribute to roadmap decisions and execute on them reliably inside active engineering programs.
- Scale the platform across multiple operating companies and help build and mentor the small team that follows you.
- 4+ years shipping software in production, including systems that real customers depended on daily.
- Proven track record deploying LLM agent workflows that call real tools, handle failure gracefully, and are held to rigorous eval suites.
- Strong Python and backend or ML systems engineering skills; comfort picking the right tool for the job.
- Hands-on experience with observability, evaluation frameworks, regression testing, and on-call operations for production AI systems.
- Ability to design and honestly judge evaluations — knowing when to reach for retrieval, fine-tuning, RL, or plain software.
- Excellent communicator who can earn trust on a shop floor and absorb domain expertise from experienced engineers.
- Comfortable with regular travel to partner facilities and working in-person in New York City.
- Nice to have: experience with CAD, CAE, EDA, or PLM tools; background in frontier AI, robotics, autonomous systems, or industrial software; prior RL or fine-tuning in production.
- Salary: $150,000 – $220,000 USD annually
- Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Full-time, on-site in New York City, NY. Regular travel to partner engineering sites is expected.