Founding AI Engineer

Recruiting from Scratch | Fintech

1h 57m ago

On-site

Full Time

United States of America

$210k - $250k USD/yr

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

Title of Role: Founding AI Engineer

Location: New York City, NY (Flatiron District)
Company Stage of Funding: Early-Stage Fintech
Office Type: Onsite — 5 Days/Week
Salary: $210,000–$250,000 Base + Equity
Employment Type: Full-Time

Company Description

Our client is a fintech technology company building a modern corporate access platform for investment banks and financial institutions.

The platform brings together CRM functionality, email communications, event management, reporting, and AI-powered meeting allocation to help financial institutions manage complex workflows more efficiently.

As the company expands its AI capabilities, it is looking for a Founding AI Engineer to build and deploy intelligent, agentic product features that enterprise financial customers can trust with real business operations.

This is a high-ownership opportunity to shape the company's AI architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction while working closely with its founders and product engineering team.

What You Will Do

Design, build, and ship customer-facing LLM and agentic AI features into production.
Own AI product development end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, evaluation, and ongoing improvement.
Build reliable agent systems involving prompting, tool use, context management, and multi-step workflows.
Develop evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and failure-handling mechanisms for production AI systems.
Integrate frontier AI models into enterprise applications.
Build backend APIs and services using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
Deploy and operate AI-powered applications using AWS infrastructure.
Collaborate with product engineers to integrate AI capabilities into customer-facing applications.
Design systems that meet the reliability and operational expectations of enterprise financial institutions.
Establish technical patterns, development processes, and engineering standards for the company's growing AI capabilities.
Work directly with engineering leadership to identify high-impact AI opportunities and deliver production-ready solutions.

Ideal Candidate Background

4+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
Demonstrated experience shipping customer-facing LLM-powered features into production.
Strong hands-on experience with frontier language models and their integration into real applications.
Experience building agentic systems involving prompting, tool use, and context management.
Understanding of production AI reliability, including evaluations, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.
Strong Python backend engineering experience, ideally with FastAPI or Django.
Experience developing and operating applications on AWS.
Ability to independently own technically complex projects from architecture through production.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design capabilities.
Experience collaborating with product engineers to deliver complete customer-facing features.
Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.
Comfortable working in a small, high-ownership engineering team.
Able to work onsite in New York City five days per week.

Preferred

Previous experience as a founding engineer, early AI engineer, or senior individual contributor at a startup.
Experience building production-grade AI agents that perform meaningful business tasks.
Experience designing AI evaluation pipelines and regression testing frameworks.
Familiarity with LLM orchestration, tool calling, and structured outputs.
Experience with AI observability, monitoring, and production incident resolution.
Background in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, or regulated industries.
Experience transitioning from traditional machine learning into production LLM applications.
Experience establishing technical architecture and engineering processes for new teams.

Compensation & Benefits

$210,000–$250,000 base salary
Equity compensation
Significant ownership over the company's AI architecture and product capabilities
Direct collaboration with the co-founder and CIO
Opportunity to establish the foundation for a growing AI engineering function
Hands-on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities
Onsite work environment in Manhattan's Flatiron District

This opportunity is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building real AI products, solving challenging reliability problems, and taking founding-level ownership of systems used by enterprise customers.

Required Skills

pythonfastapidjangoaws

Required Languages

🇬🇧 English

Company Description

Our client is a fintech technology company building a modern corporate access platform for investment banks and financial institutions.

This is a high-ownership opportunity to shape the company's AI architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction while working closely with its founders and product engineering team.

What You Will Do

Design, build, and ship customer-facing LLM and agentic AI features into production.

Own AI product development end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, evaluation, and ongoing improvement.

Build reliable agent systems involving prompting, tool use, context management, and multi-step workflows.

Develop evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and failure-handling mechanisms for production AI systems.

Integrate frontier AI models into enterprise applications.

Build backend APIs and services using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.

Deploy and operate AI-powered applications using AWS infrastructure.

Collaborate with product engineers to integrate AI capabilities into customer-facing applications.

Design systems that meet the reliability and operational expectations of enterprise financial institutions.

Establish technical patterns, development processes, and engineering standards for the company's growing AI capabilities.

Work directly with engineering leadership to identify high-impact AI opportunities and deliver production-ready solutions.

Ideal Candidate Background

4+ years of professional backend engineering experience.

Demonstrated experience shipping customer-facing LLM-powered features into production.

Strong hands-on experience with frontier language models and their integration into real applications.

Experience building agentic systems involving prompting, tool use, and context management.

Understanding of production AI reliability, including evaluations, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.

Strong Python backend engineering experience, ideally with FastAPI or Django.

Experience developing and operating applications on AWS.

Ability to independently own technically complex projects from architecture through production.

Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design capabilities.

Experience collaborating with product engineers to deliver complete customer-facing features.

Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.

Comfortable working in a small, high-ownership engineering team.

Able to work onsite in New York City five days per week.

Preferred

Previous experience as a founding engineer, early AI engineer, or senior individual contributor at a startup.

Experience building production-grade AI agents that perform meaningful business tasks.

Experience designing AI evaluation pipelines and regression testing frameworks.

Familiarity with LLM orchestration, tool calling, and structured outputs.

Experience with AI observability, monitoring, and production incident resolution.

Background in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, or regulated industries.

Experience transitioning from traditional machine learning into production LLM applications.

Experience establishing technical architecture and engineering processes for new teams.

Compensation & Benefits

$210,000–$250,000 base salary

Equity compensation

Significant ownership over the company's AI architecture and product capabilities

Direct collaboration with the co-founder and CIO

Opportunity to establish the foundation for a growing AI engineering function

Hands-on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities

Onsite work environment in Manhattan's Flatiron District

This opportunity is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building real AI products, solving challenging reliability problems, and taking founding-level ownership of systems used by enterprise customers.