AI Engineer

Avacend; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Meaningful equity ownership

Opportunity to shape a rapidly growing

Direct collaboration with founders

Small, high-impact engineering team

Job summary

Avacend, a venture-backed startup, is seeking an AI Founding Software Engineer to join as an early engineering hire in New York City. You will architect, build, and scale production AI systems from the ground up while collaborating directly with the founding team.

You should have hands-on experience shipping production AI/LLM applications, building autonomous agents, and owning technical architecture from concept to deployment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong hands-on coding skills.
• Recent experience building and shipping production AI/LLM applications.
• Deep understanding of agent frameworks, orchestration, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and production deployment.
• Experience with LangGraph, DSPy, Anthropic SDK, OpenAI APIs, or similar frameworks.
• Ability to independently design and own technical architecture from concept through production.
• Must be based in the New York State area or willing to relocate.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy production-ready AI agents and LLM-powered applications.
• Architect scalable agent orchestration systems with a focus on reliability, evaluation, and failure handling.
• Develop AI solutions that automate complex business workflows using structured and unstructured data.
• Build reusable platform components that support multiple customer use cases.
• Collaborate directly with founders and cross-functional stakeholders to shape product strategy.
• Continuously improve model performance, monitoring, and system reliability in production environments.

Skills

5+ years software engineering

Production AI/LLM apps

Agent frameworks

Prompt engineering

Tools

LangGraph

DSPy

Anthropic SDK

OpenAI APIs

Job description

AI Engineer (Founding)

Location: Hybrid New York City (3 days onsite per week)

Compensation: $170,000 $250,000 base salary + equity

About the Opportunity

We're seeking an experienced AI Founding Software Engineer to join a fast-growing, venture-backed startup building next-generation AI solutions for enterprise customers. As one of the earliest engineering hires, you'll play a pivotal role in architecting, building, and scaling production AI systems from the ground up while working directly with the founding team.

We're looking for an engineer who has recently shipped production AI products or customer-facing AI features, has hands‑on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications and autonomous AI agents, and thrives in a fast‑paced startup environment. Ideal candidates have served as a Founding AI Engineer, Founding Software Engineer, or early engineering team member, where they took ownership of technical architecture, product development, and production deployments.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, building scalable ai infrastructure, and shaping both the technology and the future direction of a high‑growth AI startup.

• Design, build, and deploy production-ready AI agents and LLM-powered applications.
• Architect scalable agent orchestration systems with a focus on reliability, evaluation, and failure handling.
• Develop AI solutions that automate complex business workflows using structured and unstructured data.
• Build reusable platform components that support multiple customer use cases.
• Collaborate directly with founders and cross‑functional stakeholders to shape product strategy.
• Continuously improve model performance, monitoring, and system reliability in production environments.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong hands‑on coding skills.
• Recent experience building and shipping production AI/LLM applications.
• Deep understanding of agent frameworks, orchestration, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and production deployment.
• Experience with modern AI technologies such as LangGraph, DSPy, Anthropic SDK, OpenAI APIs, or similar frameworks.
• Ability to independently design and own technical architecture from concept through production.
• Must be based in the New York State area or willing to relocate.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Preferred Qualifications

• Startup experience as an early engineer or founding engineer.
• Experience working with healthcare, legal, finance, insurance, or other document‑intensive industries.
• Contributions to open‑source AI projects, technical blogs, GitHub repositories, or conference presentations.
• Experience transforming custom customer solutions into scalable platform capabilities.
• Strong understanding of production monitoring, AI evaluations, tracing, and model optimization.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary
• Meaningful equity ownership
• Opportunity to help shape a rapidly growing AI startup
• Direct collaboration with experienced founders and executive leadership
• Small, high‑impact engineering team where your work will influence product direction from day one

If you're passionate about building production AI systems and want to work on cutting‑edge generative AI technologies in a fast‑paced startup environment, we'd love to hear from you.