Founding Engineer
Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
This role is on-site in New York City. Regular travel to partner engineering companies across North America is expected as part of the job.
Seed-stage AI startup in NYC seeks founding engineer with 4+ years production experience, strong Python and LLM agent skills, to own technical execution of AI platform for defense and medical device engineering. On-site with frequent travel. Salary $150-220k, no visa sponsorship.
ABOUT THE ROLE
A seed-stage AI startup operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence and hardware engineering is looking for a Founding Engineer to own the entire technical execution of the platform. You will partner directly with the Co-Founder and CTO to architect, build, and ship AI systems that help defense and medical device engineering firms move at the speed of software. You will set the technical bar for every future hire and your decisions will shape the company's foundation.
This is a full-time, in-person role based in New York City. Some travel to customer sites (engineering firms across North America) is required.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Design and build the core system architecture integrating AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tooling — including the security posture required by defense and medical customers.
- Own end-to-end engineering execution: architecture 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 a working engineer depends on weekly and 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 with engineers at operating companies, understand where the system fails against real deadlines, and translate those learnings into durable platform capabilities.
- Contribute to roadmap prioritization and execute it reliably inside real engineering programs.
- Expand the platform across multiple partner companies with measurable cycle-time reduction, while hiring and mentoring a small team around you.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Must-haves
- 4+ years shipping software to production, including systems that real customers depended on daily.
- Proven track record shipping LLM agent workflows in production: real tool calls, failure handling, and rigorous eval suites — you know exactly where they break.
- Strong Python and backend or ML systems engineering for production AI systems.
- Experience with observability, evaluation suites, regression testing, and on-call operations.
- Ability to design agent orchestration architectures and tool-integration systems.
- Experience building feedback loops and evaluation pipelines for AI model improvement.
- Track record of deploying AI into customer environments and iterating on real-world failure modes.
- Comfortable earning trust with domain experts — including 30-year mechanical or electrical engineers on the shop floor.
- Low ego, high standards, willingness to travel to customer sites.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with CAD, CAE, EDA, PLM, or similar domain-specific engineering software.
- Background in frontier AI, applied AI, physical-world AI, or industrial software.
- Experience with reinforcement learning or fine-tuning in production systems.
- Prior work in simulation, robotics, autonomous systems, or physical-world AI.
- Early-stage startup or technical founder experience.
Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Base salary: $150,000 – $220,000 USD annually
- Founding equity package
- Opportunity to build and lead engineering from day one
LOCATION
This role is on-site in New York City. Regular travel to partner engineering companies across North America is expected as part of the job.