Founding AI Engineer: LLMs & Agents (Hybrid, Equity)

Avacend Inc; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Avacend Inc. is seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join an early-stage team in New York, NY (Hybrid). You will build and ship production-grade AI systems, with hands-on work on LLMs and agentic AI, owning critical platform primitives as the founding engineer.

The role requires strong coding discipline, ownership, and a track record of shipping real-world AI solutions with messy data, in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on experience building production AI systems.
• Proven production experience with LLMs and AI agents, not just prompts.
• Experience with agent orchestration, state management, evaluations, failure handling, and reliability.
• Public artifacts of AI work (GitHub repos, blogs, talks, open-source contributions).

Responsibilities

• Build and ship production-grade AI systems as part of an early founding team.
• Turn customer-specific AI needs into reusable platform primitives and capabilities.
• Collaborate directly with the founder to own significant parts of product and tech.

Skills

Hands-on AI engineering

Production code author

LLMs & AI agents

Agent orchestration

State management

Evaluations & reliability

Public artifacts

Tools

LangGraph

DSPy

Inspect

Anthropic SDK

Job description

Avacend Inc. is seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join an early-stage team in New York, NY (Hybrid). You will build and ship production-grade AI systems, with hands-on work on LLMs and agentic AI, owning critical platform primitives as the founding engineer.

The role requires strong coding discipline, ownership, and a track record of shipping real-world AI solutions with messy data, in a fast-paced startup environment.