Founding AI Engineer: Build Production-Grade AI Systems

FDE Team; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

FDE Team is seeking a Founding AI Engineer / Member of Technical Staff to build production-grade AI systems from the ground up in a fast-moving environment. You will own architecture, implement delivery pipelines, and shape technical direction across AI, backend, data infrastructure, and product.

Strong ownership and hands-on leadership are essential. This role blends AI systems work with traditional software engineering, requiring you to design APIs, data architectures, distributed services,

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with production systems.
• Hands-on Python and one or more Go/Java/C++/TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Strong backend, distributed systems, APIs, data structures, and system design.
• Hands-on with LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, AI agents, or related AI/ML tech.
• Experience delivering complex products from prototype to production.
• Familiar with modern data architectures incl. structured/unstructured data.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience with containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and testing.
• Strong debugging and performance analysis abilities.
• Ability to work independently in ambiguous environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production-grade AI applications and platforms.
• Take new products from 0→1, prototype through production and scale.
• Build AI-powered apps using LLMs, RAG, agents, and intelligent workflows.
• Architect scalable backend services, APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines.
• Develop production software with Python and other languages.
• Work with structured and unstructured data across data stores and search.
• Build evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, observability, and testing infra.
• Design orchestration and tool-use patterns for agentic AI systems.
• Integrate foundation models with customer and enterprise systems.
• Improve performance, reliability, scalability, and security of prod AI apps.
• Prototype quickly, evaluate results, and deploy successful approaches.
• Diagnose issues across models, apps, data, infra, and services.
• Make architecture decisions balancing speed and maintainability.
• Collaborate with senior engineers, product, customers, and business teams.
• Help establish engineering standards and best practices as org scales.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

TypeScript

JavaScript

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Data structures

System design

LLMs / Generative AI

AI systems

Education

Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, AI/ML, or related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Monitoring/Observability

Testing

Job description

FDE Team is seeking a Founding AI Engineer / Member of Technical Staff to build production-grade AI systems from the ground up in a fast-moving environment. You will own architecture, implement delivery pipelines, and shape technical direction across AI, backend, data infrastructure, and product.

Strong ownership and hands-on leadership are essential. This role blends AI systems work with traditional software engineering, requiring you to design APIs, data architectures, distributed services,