Founding AI Engineer

Shields Group Search; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity Included

Job summary

Shields Group Search partners with a New York City–based technology company to build a corporate access platform for investment banks. We are hiring a Founding AI Engineer in New York City to own AI architecture, infrastructure, and production systems from day one.

You will ship agentic features, design robust backend AI tooling, and establish engineering patterns that scale with the team. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role guiding early AI efforts.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping LLM-powered features into production.
• Hands-on experience with frontier model prompting and prompt engineering.
• Experience designing and deploying production-ready agentic AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build production-ready agentic AI features for banking workflows.
• Own architectural decisions balancing performance, cost and maintainability.
• Design AI infrastructure including evals, guardrails, tool integrations, and observability.
• Develop backend APIs using Python, Django, and/or FastAPI, with AWS infrastructure.
• Define technical patterns and processes to support future AI team growth.
• Evaluate new AI tools, frontier models and techniques to improve the product.

Skills

LLM-powered features in production

Frontier model prompting

Agentic AI systems design

Tools

Python

Django

FastAPI

AWS

Job description

New York City, NY | In-Person | $210,000–$250,000 Base + Equity

About the Company

Shields Group Search is partnering with a growing New York City-based technology company building a corporate access platform for investment banks. The platform supports CRM, email, event management, reporting, and AI-powered meeting allocation.

The company is investing in AI-powered capabilities designed to streamline workflows and enable large financial institutions to confidently automate meaningful work.

About the Role

We're seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join the team in New York City.

This is an early, high-impact AI engineering position focused on building and shipping agentic product features that large banks will trust with real work. You'll take significant ownership of AI architecture, infrastructure, and production systems while helping establish the technical patterns and processes that will guide the AI team as it grows.

This is a hands‑on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities, reporting directly to the Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer (CIO).

The ideal candidate has built and deployed end-to-end AI systems and features in production, ideally with experience implementing evaluations.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship agentic AI features: Develop production-ready agentic product capabilities that large banks can trust with real workflows.
• Own architectural decisions: Make technical architecture decisions that balance performance, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Design AI infrastructure: Build the underlying agent infrastructure, including evaluations (evals), guardrails, tool integrations, and observability.
• Develop backend systems: Build and maintain backend APIs using Python, Django, and/or FastAPI, along with AWS infrastructure, collaborating with product engineers on UI integration.
• Establish engineering foundations: Define and implement technical patterns, processes, and best practices to support the AI team's future growth.
• Evaluate emerging technologies: Research and assess new AI tools, frontier models, and techniques to continuously improve the product.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping LLM-powered features into production.
• Hands‑on experience with frontier model prompting and prompt engineering.
• Experience designing and deploying production-ready agentic AI systems.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• End-to-end AI ownership: Has independently built, deployed, and maintained AI systems and features in production, ideally incorporating evaluations.
• Collaborative and mission-driven: Works effectively across teams, asks thoughtful questions, seeks to understand broader context, and prioritizes the collective mission.
• Strong technical foundations: A background in traditional machine learning followed by a transition into modern AI engineering is welcome. Depth and quality of AI experience matter more than the total number of years spent working in the field.
• Meaningful ownership: Has demonstrated outsized responsibility, technical impact, and ownership in previous roles.
• Curious and adaptable: Interested in emerging AI technologies and comfortable evaluating new models, tools, and approaches to solve complex product challenges.

Compensation & Logistics

• Equity: Included
• Location: New York City, NY
• Work Arrangement: In‑person
• Reporting To: Co-Founder & CIO
• Visa Sponsorship: Sponsorship is generally not anticipated

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to join as an early AI engineer and directly influence how agentic AI is built and deployed within a platform serving major financial institutions.

You'll have substantial technical ownership, work closely with company leadership and product engineers, and help establish the infrastructure, architecture, and engineering practices that shape the company's AI capabilities as the team scales.

If you're an AI engineer who has successfully shipped production LLM and agentic systems, enjoys taking end-to-end ownership, and wants to build AI products that solve meaningful problems in financial services, we'd love to hear from you.