AI Founding Engineer (LLM and Shipping Agents)

Avacend Inc; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Avacend Inc. is seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join an early-stage team in New York, NY (Hybrid). You will build and ship production-grade AI systems, with hands-on work on LLMs and agentic AI, owning critical platform primitives as the founding engineer.

The role requires strong coding discipline, ownership, and a track record of shipping real-world AI solutions with messy data, in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on experience building production AI systems.
• Proven production experience with LLMs and AI agents, not just prompts.
• Experience with agent orchestration, state management, evaluations, failure handling, and reliability.
• Public artifacts of AI work (GitHub repos, blogs, talks, open-source contributions).

Responsibilities

• Build and ship production-grade AI systems as part of an early founding team.
• Turn customer-specific AI needs into reusable platform primitives and capabilities.
• Collaborate directly with the founder to own significant parts of product and tech.

Skills

Hands-on AI engineering

Production code author

LLMs & AI agents

Agent orchestration

State management

Evaluations & reliability

Public artifacts

Tools

LangGraph

DSPy

Inspect

Anthropic SDK

Job description

Founding AI Engineer - LLMs & Agentic AI

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)

Employment Type: Full-Time (Base Salary Equity)

Experience: Startup / Early-Stage Experience Preferred

We are looking for a Founding AI Engineer to join an early-stage team and take a hands-on role in building and shipping production-grade AI systems. This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys working directly with the founder, solving complex problems, and turning customer-specific solutions into scalable platform capabilities.

What We're Looking For

• Currently writing production code with a strong hands-on engineering focus. Your most recent hands-on production/shipping experience should be within the past 12 months.
• Proven production experience with LLMs and AI agents - not just prompt engineering. Experience should include agent orchestration, state management, evaluations, failure handling, and production reliability.
• Comfortable working in a small, founding-team environment with a high degree of ownership and direct collaboration with the founder.
• Demonstrated public artifacts of agentic AI work, such as:
• GitHub repositories
• Technical blog posts
• Conference or meetup talks
• Open-source contributions to projects such as LangGraph, DSPy, Inspect, Anthropic SDK, or similar ecosystems.

Experience building Vertical AI solutions, particularly in domains such as:

• Healthcare
• Legal
• Insurance
• Finance
• Strong experience working with messy, unstructured, and complex real-world data.
• Experience transforming custom customer implementations into reusable platform primitives, frameworks, or product capabilities.
• Previous experience as an early engineer or founding engineer at a startup, ideally in a fast-paced environment where you owned significant parts of the product and technology.

Ideal Candidate

You are a hands-on AI engineer and builder, not someone focused solely on research, strategy, or prompt engineering. You enjoy taking ambiguous problems from concept to production, building reliable agentic systems, and creating reusable technology that can scale beyond individual customer engagements.

If you have production LLM/agent experience, strong engineering fundamentals, startup experience, and publicly demonstrable AI work, we’d love to hear from you.