Founding AI Research Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Built Different, an Amsterdam startup, is rebuilding how regulated firms onboard clients. They seek an AI engineer who will accelerate growth, report to the founder, and own real surface area from day one.

You will design the reasoning layer, build multi-agent systems, and integrate language and vision over data-heavy documents, while setting technical direction as the first dedicated AI hire. Equity and a founding-team seat are offered.

Qualifications

• Experience with linked data, graphs and structured knowledge.
• Hands-on work with complex multi-agent reasoning in data-heavy domains.
• Comfort working in high-stakes domains such as regulatory, legal or financial.

Responsibilities

• Build the reasoning layer that goes beyond retrieval to link data and knowledge graphs.
• Design complex multi-agent systems that reason across regulatory constraints and stay correct end-to-end.
• Bring language and vision together over data-heavy documents (plans, drawings, blueprints).
• Own evaluation and guardrails to keep cited answers trustworthy and defendable.

Skills

Linked data

Knowledge graphs

Multi-agent systems

Regulatory domain

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.

Every AI team can wire up a RAG pipeline now. Far fewer can make a model genuinely reason over structured, formal knowledge - linked data, knowledge graphs, complex multi-agent systems, language and vision together - and stay right where being wrong has real consequences. That harder thing is what this role is about.

The straightforward part is built. Now they need the person who builds the step change, the reasoning layer that takes it somewhere the rest of the market can't follow.

Salary up to €110k + equity + 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

Niche by design - linked data and AI, complex multi-agent, or multimodal over plans and blueprints

Real ownership of backend architecture, security and core business logic

What you'll be doing

• Build the reasoning layer that goes beyond retrieval - linked data, knowledge graphs, structured formal knowledge
• Design complex multi-agent systems that reason across regulation and stay correct end to end
• Bring language and vision together over data-heavy documents - plans, drawings, blueprints
• Own the evaluation and guardrails that keep every cited answer trustworthy
• Set the technical direction as the first dedicated AI hire, working directly with the founders

You'll love this if...

• You've built something most AI engineers haven't - linked data and AI, knowledge graphs, complex multi-agent, or multimodal in a data-heavy domain
• You understand models from the inside - fine-tuning or post-training, not just calling an API
• You're drawn to formal, high-stakes domains - legal, regulatory, medical, construction
• You want founding-level ownership and equity, not a seat in the machine
• You can go deep on the hard problem and still ship pragmatically

Because great teams are Built Different.