Founding AI Engineer: LLM Agents & Distributed Systems

Big Wave Digital; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founder-level equity

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

Job summary

Big Wave Digital is hiring a Founding AI Engineer in San Francisco to own a domain end to end, build AI systems, and interact with customers to deliver value. You’ll design scalable data graphs, search and pricing workflows, and a durable agent platform in a fast-moving, founder-led environment.

Expect to work on distributed systems, LLM-enabled tooling, and direct customer interaction. Salary ranges from USD 150K–300K with founder-level equity; in-office five days a week.

Qualifications

• Two archetypes: early-career engineer (2–5 years) with strong CS fundamentals and fast progression; experienced systems architect (up to 15 years) with design expertise and founder-level ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own an entire problem domain end to end and build the AI systems that run it.
• Speak with customers directly, gather feedback, and ship relentlessly.
• Design matching, deduplication, and canonicalisation systems for scalable data graphs.
• Develop retrieval-augmented substitution using embeddings and vector search.
• Build durable-execution agent platform on distributed infra and ensure fault tolerance.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python/TypeScript/Node.js

Applied LLM engineering

Tools

Temporal

Kafka

Job description

Big Wave Digital is hiring a Founding AI Engineer in San Francisco to own a domain end to end, build AI systems, and interact with customers to deliver value. You’ll design scalable data graphs, search and pricing workflows, and a durable agent platform in a fast-moving, founder-led environment.

Expect to work on distributed systems, LLM-enabled tooling, and direct customer interaction. Salary ranges from USD 150K–300K with founder-level equity; in-office five days a week.