Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineer role at an AI-native fintech startup building an autonomous system that understands businesses, finds buyers, structures financing, and manages deals end-to-end. You will own the most critical technical challenges at any given time and help shape the institution from first principles alongside an exceptional early team.

What You'll Do

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Help select and shape the early technical team, setting standards for how the engineering organization operates.
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Build intelligence that models businesses, reconciles contradictory evidence, and reasons about how decisions propagate through companies and markets.
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Design and ship agents that coordinate months of complex financial work across hundreds of counterparties, preserving context, commitments, and dependencies as conditions evolve.
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Own end-to-end architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for production AI systems.
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Move from ambiguous, high-stakes problems to working, reliable products across backend systems, applied AI, and user-facing interfaces.
What We're Looking For
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8+ years of experience shipping production-grade systems and owning critical technical decisions.
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Deep hands-on expertise in applied AI, particularly building intelligent agents for complex, multi-party workflows.
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Full-stack AI engineering background spanning backend systems, AI components, and product interfaces.
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Experience with retrieval, memory systems, and evaluation frameworks in data-intensive environments.
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Track record building AI models for business-process automation, evidence reconciliation, or decision propagation.
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Experience owning greenfield or first-principles architecture for complex AI systems.
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Background in financial services, document intelligence, or other complex professional workflows is a strong plus.
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Experience at AI/ML document-intelligence or fintech research-tooling companies is a plus.
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Strong drive for ownership, craftsmanship, and measuring whether systems actually work in the real world.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $180,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Equity offered. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.