Founding AI Engineer & Co-Founder in Residence — NYC

Vertex; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Vertex, an AI-native startup, seeks a Founding AI Engineer & Entrepreneur in Residence in New York City to build the first product end-to-end. You will work directly with the founder, from customer conversations to production deployment, with the potential to spin out the project as a co-founded company.

You will own the initial product build, including data models, LLM/agent layers, evaluators, UI, and deployment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years as a software engineer with ownership of a product from 0→1.
• Shipped production AI used by customers (LLM apps, agents, RAG).
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript and a modern web framework; cloud infra and CI.
• Willing to relocate to New York; in-person work required.

Responsibilities

• Own the product from zero: architecture, stack, and the first ten thousand lines.
• Build production LLM features for non-technical users: retrieval, agents, structured extraction, evals, guardrails.
• Turn legacy data and workflows into model-ready inputs.
• Talk to customers weekly and adapt the product accordingly.
• Hire the first engineers once spinout is funded.
• Set engineering culture for a yet-to-be-established company.

Skills

Ownership of product

AI production experience

Python/TypeScript

Full-stack web

Customer communication

Relocation to NYC

Tools

PostgreSQL

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Job description

Vertex, an AI-native startup, seeks a Founding AI Engineer & Entrepreneur in Residence in New York City to build the first product end-to-end. You will work directly with the founder, from customer conversations to production deployment, with the potential to spin out the project as a co-founded company.

You will own the initial product build, including data models, LLM/agent layers, evaluators, UI, and deployment.