Founding AI Engineer

Rise Technical; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

$120,000 - $200,000 base salary

0.5 - 2% equity

Flexible PTO

Job summary

A fast-growing AI startup is seeking a Specialist Recruitment Consultant to design and implement cutting-edge agentic AI systems. This role involves working closely with the founding team in the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on building reliable workflows and ensuring robust performance of the AI agents. The ideal candidate has over 3 years of AI/ML experience, strong skills in Python, and familiarity with LLM platforms. Expect deep technical responsibility and a chance to influence product outcomes.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional engineering experience with focus on AI/ML systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with LLMs in production.
• Comfortable working in a high-autonomy, feedback-driven startup.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with founders to design and ship agentic AI systems.
• Build production-grade AI agent workflows focused on reliability.
• Own core agent architecture decisions including orchestration.

Skills

Strong proficiency in Python

Experience with React/TypeScript

Building agentic systems with LLM platforms

Experience with PostgreSQL

Experience with AWS

Job description

Specialist Recruitment Consultant, building out and scaling top start‑up teams

$120,000 - $200,000 + 0.5‑2% Equity + Flexible PTO

Are you an AI engineer who wants to build and own the core agentic systems powering an AI platform used by Fortune 500 companies, transforming manual compliance workflows into autonomous intelligence, whilst benefiting from full autonomy and founding‑level equity?

This is a rare opportunity to join a YC‑backed, fast‑growing AI startup tackling a multi‑billion dollar market historically dominated by manual processes and consulting firms. The team is building AI agent systems that autonomously perform complex enterprise workflows end‑to‑end—data collection, analysis, verification, and documentation. Every output is auditable, verifiable, and delivered at scales and speeds impossible with traditional manual processes.

You will own the core agentic engine of the platform, designing how AI agents plan, execute, and verify messy real‑world tasks. This includes building production‑grade agent workflows focused on reliability, owning core architecture decisions around orchestration and state management, defining human‑in‑the‑loop patterns, crafting error handling and recovery systems, and continuously improving agent capabilities by applying lessons learned from each deployment.

You’ll report directly to the founding team and CTO and operate as a key owner of the agent architecture—how agents behave, how they integrate with the broader system, and how they deliver reliable results for customers. Expect deep technical responsibility, product influence, and the chance to define new best practices for agentic systems as enterprise workflows serve as ideal problem definitions for AI agents.

The Role

• Work directly with founders and CTO to design and ship agentic AI systems that autonomously perform complex enterprise work end‑to‑end
• Build production‑grade AI agent workflows focused on reliability and solving concrete customer problems, not research or model tuning
• Design and implement how AI agents plan, execute, and verify complex, messy real‑world tasks
• Own core agent architecture decisions including orchestration, state management, error handling, and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns
• Define new best practices for agentic systems as enterprise workflows serve as ideal problem definitions for AI agents
• Iterate rapidly based on direct user feedback, shipping agent capabilities that get used in production immediately

The Person

• 3+ years of professional engineering experience with focus on AI/ML systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with React/TypeScript
• Experience building agentic systems with LLM platforms (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar)
• Deep hands‑on experience with LLMs in production — building reliable agentic systems, not just API calls
• Experience with PostgreSQL and SQL database design
• Experience with AWS and modern cloud infrastructure
• Comfortable working in a high‑autonomy, feedback‑driven early‑stage startup environment

Seniority level: Mid‑Senior level

Employment type: Full‑time

Location: Mountain View, CA (San Francisco Bay Area)