Founding AI Engineer | Equity & Impact in Knowledge

Selby Jennings; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Selby Jennings is partnering with an early-stage AI company to recruit a Founding Engineer in the NYC & Chicago area. You will join as one of the earliest technical hires and help shape both the product and the company.

You'll work with founders and engineering leadership to build a core AI product, influence architecture and culture, and scale from early traction to a robust platform with knowledge systems, retrieval, and AI-powered research tools.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience building production AI applications.
• Experience with RAG, retrieval, search, knowledge systems, or agentic AI.
• Strong product instincts and customer-focused thinking.
• Ability to take ambiguous problems and drive them to production.
• Comfortable working across multiple areas of the stack when needed.
• High ownership and strong communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Building backend systems that power knowledge-intensive workflows.
• Designing and improving search, retrieval, and AI-assisted product experiences.
• Building customer-facing AI products that solve real business problems.
• Developing systems that help users find, organize, and leverage information more effectively.
• Working directly with customers to understand pain points and translate feedback into product features.
• Improving system quality, evaluation, reliability, and observability.
• Helping establish engineering best practices and technical standards.

Skills

Software engineering

Production AI applications

RAG and retrieval systems

Search and knowledge systems

Agentic AI

Customer-focused thinking

Strong communication

Job description

Selby Jennings is partnering with an early-stage AI company to recruit a Founding Engineer in the NYC & Chicago area. You will join as one of the earliest technical hires and help shape both the product and the company.

You'll work with founders and engineering leadership to build a core AI product, influence architecture and culture, and scale from early traction to a robust platform with knowledge systems, retrieval, and AI-powered research tools.