AI Engineer

Young Founders School; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Young Founders School in New York seeks an AI Engineer to own the piping and architecture under our app stack. You will ensure shared auth, data, and AI pipelines are fast, reliable, and scalable across all apps.

You will work with app owners and AI coding agents to ship features weekly, design robust endpoints, monitor cost and latency, and keep the system simple and maintainable.

If you love building with AI, improving reliability, and operating in a fast-growing company, this is for you.

Qualifications

• AI-native engineer with production experience.
• Shipped and operated software used by real users.
• Strong full-stack skills: TS/React, APIs, Postgres.
• Experience with LLMs, prompts, tool-calling, evals.
• Focus on reliability: monitoring, CI, tests, deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture across apps: auth, data, and progress sharing.
• Build and maintain piping: APIs, data syncs, integrations.
• Make AI features reliable: prompts, routing, evals, costs.
• Monitor production: error alerts, triage, root-cause fixes.
• Collaborate with app owners to unblock hard problems.
• Set up guardrails: tests, CI, environments, clean deploys.

Skills

AI-native engineer

Production software

TypeScript/React

APIs

Postgres

Cloud hosting

LLMs in prod

Prompts & tool calling

Model evals

Cost management

Monitoring & CI

Testing discipline

Strong communicator

US work hours

Tools

Next.js

Supabase

Vercel

Sentry

Job description

You're the engineer who makes everything else work. When a login breaks between two apps, a data sync silently stops, or an AI feature starts returning garbage at 2am, you're the one who finds it, fixes it, and makes sure it never happens that way again. You build with AI every day, and you care as much about the boring parts (auth, data, monitoring, deploys) as the shiny ones.

Founders School is a 4-year program where teenagers build real companies targeting $1M in profit by graduation. The whole program runs on software we build ourselves: an app for building a business, one for growing an audience, one for developing real expertise, plus the tools our guides use to track every student. Each app has an owner pushing it forward fast. What we need now is the engineer who makes sure all of it holds together.

We're hiring an AI Engineer to support every app in the stack and own the piping and architecture underneath them. Your job is simple to say and hard to do: make sure all of our stuff works super well.

The Role

You're the shared engineer across the whole Founders School software stack. The app owners and their AI coding agents ship features every week. You make sure those features sit on a foundation that's fast, reliable, and connected: shared auth and data, the integrations between apps, the AI pipelines, monitoring, and deploys.

You jump in wherever an app needs real engineering horsepower, and you spend the rest of your time making the whole system simpler, sturdier, and easier to build on.

What you will be doing

• Owning the architecture across all of our apps: how they share users, data, and auth, and how a student's progress in one app shows up in the others.

• Building and maintaining the piping: APIs, integrations, data syncs, background jobs, and the connections our guides and internal tools rely on.

• Making our AI features reliable. Prompts, model routing, evals, cost, and latency, so the coaching and feedback students get is consistently good.

• Watching production. You own error monitoring and alerting, triage what breaks, fix the root cause, and close the loop.

• Helping every app owner ship. You pair on hard problems, review risky changes, and unblock them when something is beyond a prototype.

• Setting up the guardrails that let a small team and a fleet of AI coding agents move fast without breaking things: tests, CI, environments, and clean deploys.

What you will NOT be doing

• Owning a single app's roadmap. App owners decide what their app does; you make sure it works.

• Building heavyweight enterprise process. We want the simplest system that works, not a platform team's wish list.

• Rewriting things for the sake of it. You fix what matters and leave what's working alone.

• Working with students day to day. You'll see their usage and hear from app owners and guides, but you're not in the classroom.

What this looks like in practice

Monday triage. Overnight alerts show sign-ins failing for a handful of students moving between two apps. You trace it to an auth edge case, ship the fix by lunch, add a test so it can't come back, and post a two-line write-up for the team.

Wednesday architecture. Two app owners both want student progress from a third app. Instead of two one-off integrations, you design one clean shared endpoint, build it, and both of them are using it by Friday.

Friday reliability review. You look at the week's errors, slowest pages, and AI costs across every app. You kill a noisy failure that's been hiding real ones, cut a model bill by moving one feature to a cheaper model with no drop in quality, and set next week's priorities.

The three things that matter most

1. Everything works. Students and guides don't hit broken flows, missing data, or downtime, and when something does break, it's fixed fast.

2. The apps work together. Data, auth, and progress flow cleanly between every app in the stack.

3. The team ships faster because of you. App owners spend their time on product, not fighting infrastructure.

What this becomes

At 6 months, you know every app and every connection between them. Error rates are down, alerts mean something, and app owners come to you before they build anything that touches shared systems.

At 12 months, the stack is something we're proud of: reliable, well-monitored, and ready for new campuses and thousands of students without a rewrite.

As Founders School scales, this role grows into leading platform engineering, with your own team owning the foundation every app is built on.

Candidate requirements

• You are an AI-native engineer. You build with AI coding tools every day and know how to get great, reliable output from them. Non-negotiable.

• You've shipped and run production software with real users, and you've been the one on the hook when it broke.

• You're strong across the full stack: TypeScript/React front ends, APIs, Postgres, and modern cloud hosting.

• You've built with LLMs in production: prompts, structured output, tool calling, evals, and keeping costs sane.

• You care about reliability: monitoring, testing, CI, and clean deploys are habits, not afterthoughts.

• You communicate clearly in writing and can work async with a fast-moving team.

• You can work US hours and are legally authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have

• Experience with Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, and Sentry, or close equivalents.

• Experience connecting several products into one ecosystem: shared auth, shared data, and APIs between apps.

• Experience building MCP servers or agent tooling.

• Experience at an early-stage startup where you were the one engineer holding it all together.

• Experience with consumer or education software.

What we explicitly don't need

• An engineer who only wants greenfield work. Half of this job is making existing things work better.

• Someone who needs a detailed ticket for everything. You find the problem and fix it.

• An architecture astronaut. We want simple, sturdy systems, not diagrams.

• Someone who avoids AI tools. This team builds with AI, and so will you.