Founding AI Engineer

Built Different; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 66,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Founding-team seat

Direct line to CTO

Live product with customers

Job summary

Built Different, an Amsterdam-based AI startup, seeks an AI engineer to own the core AI that turns vast regulatory data into precise, cited answers. You will design agentic flows across documents, develop guardrails, and implement robust RAG and structured retrieval in a live product used by paying customers.

You’ll report directly to the founder, ship greenfield work, and gain founding-level ownership with meaningful equity.

Qualifications

• Shipped LLM-based systems in a real product at scale.
• Strong focus on reliability, evals and guardrails.
• Interest in formal/high-stakes domains (legal/regulatory/compliance).

Responsibilities

• Own the core AI that turns large regulation datasets into precise, cited answers.
• Design long-running agentic flows that reason across documents and stay correct end-to-end.
• Build the evaluation and guardrail layer to ensure trustworthy answers.
• Build and push RAG and structured retrieval over a large corpus.
• Set the technical direction as the first dedicated AI engineer.

Skills

LLM systems

RAG systems

Guardrails

Reliability

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

Some markets are slow because they're genuinely hard. This one is slow because nobody's bothered to fix it.

An Amsterdam startup is changing that. They're rebuilding how regulated firms onboard new clients, today a weeks-long mess of emails, manual checks and chased paperwork. Their platform turns it into something clean that takes days, and quietly keeps bad actors out of the financial system while it's at it.

This is a young, international team and they are looking for an AI engineer who's going to accelerate their growth even further! You'd report straight to the founder and own real surface area from day one.

Most of what you build is greenfield. You're designing systems, and building something secure and exciting. Whatever you ship is in front of paying customers within days, and the feedback lands in real time!!

This isn't a slide in a pitch deck. The product is live, the runway runs years deep, and the market is old, niche, and barely contested.

Salary up to €110k + benefits

A genuine founding-team seat - flat structure, direct line to the CTO

Your work ships to real users in days, not quarters

An AI-native engineering culture - Claude Code, Codex and friends are part of the daily toolkit, not a side experiment

Meaningful equity - real skin in the game

Real ownership of backend architecture, security and core business logic

What you'll be doing

• Own the core AI that turns huge volumes of regulation into precise, cited answers
• Design long-running agentic flows that reason across documents and stay correct end to end
• Build the evaluation and guardrail layer that makes answers trustworthy - this is a product where "roughly right" isn't good enough
• Build and push RAG and structured retrieval over a vast, messy, formal corpus
• Set the technical direction as the first dedicated AI engineer

You'll love this if...

• You've shipped LLM systems into a real product at scale
• You obsess over reliability - evals, guardrails, being right when wrong is expensive
• You're drawn to formal, high-stakes domains (legal, regulatory, compliance) and have built RAG systems
• You want founding-level ownership and equity

Because great teams are Built Different.