Founding AI Engineer (Lead/Senior)

Evidenso; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Founders mentoring

Job summary

Evidenso is seeking a founding AI engineer who will turn messy signals into structured knowledge and shape the product alongside the founders. You will build AI systems, lead a small team, write code, hire, and set technical standards, all while delivering transparent, explainable AI that customers trust for critical decisions.

This IC-plus-manager role blends hands-on development with strategic leadership in a fast-moving B2B SaaS startup.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production LLM systems with RAG, evals, and safety guardrails.
• Knowledge graph extraction from noisy data and turning it into structured knowledge.
• Background in market research, behavioral science, or user research.

Responsibilities

• Build knowledge graph pipelines that turn messy external + customer data into structured insight.
• Design and ship LLM systems (RAG, evaluation harnesses, guardrails) that power transparent digital twin simulations.
• Create explainable AI surfaces so customers see the reasoning, not a black box.
• Own the AI/ML infrastructure roadmap, balancing speed, accuracy, and scale for a fast-moving product.
• Translate customer problems into technical bets that deliver measurable value.
• Hire, mentor, and set the technical bar for a growing engineering team.

Skills

LLM systems

Knowledge graphs

RAG with evals

Explainability

Team leadership

Product focus

Data extraction pipelines

Coding agents

Job description

Help us turn messy, unstructured signals into product intelligence customers can use. You will lead the AI stack - knowledge graphs, RAG, evaluation, and explainability - while shaping the team and the product alongside the founders.

evidenso is user validation infrastructure for product teams. It brings together market intelligence, internal customer knowledge and real participant feedback to validate prototypes, designs and feature ideas.

Teams can run usability testing in the evidenso app or through MCP in Codex and Claude, then review the evidence behind what to improve. Digital twins are one part of the workflow, alongside market signals, internal knowledge and real participant research.

The role

We're looking for a founding AI engineer who is equal parts builder, researcher, and leader. You'll be instrumental in transforming messy, unstructured data into structured knowledge graphs that power our digital twin societies. This role requires someone who can turn AI black boxes into transparent, explainable systems that our customers trust to make critical business decisions.

As a founding team member, you'll work directly with the founders, shape our technical direction, and help build the team. This is an IC-plus-manager hybrid role where you'll write code and build systems while also hiring, mentoring, and setting technical standards.

What you'll do

• Build and optimize knowledge graph pipelines that turn messy external + customer data into structured insight.
• Design and ship LLM systems (RAG, evaluation harnesses, guardrails) that power transparent digital twin simulations.
• Create explainable AI surfaces so customers see the reasoning, not a black box.
• Own the AI/ML infrastructure roadmap, balancing speed, accuracy, and scale for a fast-moving product.
• Translate customer problems into technical bets that deliver measurable value.
• Hire, mentor, and set the technical bar for a growing engineering team.

What we're looking for

• Product-minded builder obsessed with outcomes, not just elegant code.
• Deep experience shipping production LLM systems with RAG, evals, and safety guardrails; you know when to fine-tune vs. prompt.
• Knowledge graph chops: extract entities, relationships, and meaning from noisy, real-world data.
• Bias toward transparency and explainability; you refuse opaque predictions.
• Comfort in ambiguity with a founder mindset and reliable follow-through.
• Background in market research, behavioral science, or user research.
• 0-to-1 product building in B2B SaaS.
• Published research or OSS contributions in AI/ML.
• Data extraction or web-scraping pipelines at scale.
• Experience crafting coding agents.
• Founding-seat impact with significant equity; shape culture, architecture, and product from day one.
• Real AI innovation at the intersection of LLMs, knowledge graphs, and behavioral science - beyond simple API wrapping.
• Work directly with customers to improve how they validate prototypes and feature ideas.
• Seasoned founders (15 years in product, 13+ years data platforms) backed by advisors from $3B AI leaders and market research experts.
• Massive $130B+ market to reinvent with faster, more affordable market intelligence.
• Competitive salary + ownership aligned to your founding-level impact.