Founding AI Engineer: Mission-Critical LLM Systems (Hybrid)

Open Talent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; Full time

Job description

Founding AI Engineer | LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | SF / Seattle / LA

Due to regulatory constraints this role is only open to US citizens.

Only a tiny % of AI engineers can build systems where failure actually matters.

A venture-backed frontier AI company is hiring a founding AI engineer to build production LLM systems for mission‑critical aerospace, defence & industrial operations.

The work is already in production, close to users, and held to a serious technical bar. You’ll own retrieval, evaluation, grounding, latency & reliability across LLM‑driven systems tied to real operational workflows.

You’ll own retrieval, evaluation, grounding, latency & reliability across LLM‑driven systems already tied to live operational workflows. The work sits close to technical users, domain experts & founders - so you’ll see the impact of what you ship.

What You’ll Do

• Own and improve production‑grade RAG pipelines across hybrid search, reranking, embeddings & answer quality
• Optimise retrieval performance across precision, recall, latency, grounding & hallucination control
• Build scalable architecture for inference, caching, evaluation & monitoring
• Work on document intelligence, agentic workflows & technical decision systems
• Collaborate directly with founders, engineers & domain experts to ship fast without dropping the bar
• 5+ years building serious software, ML or AI systems
• Production experience with LLMs, RAG, retrieval, evals or agentic workflows
• Strong Python, backend & systems instincts
• Hands‑on experience with vector DBs, PyTorch, FastAPI, LangChain/LlamaIndex or similar
• A track record shipping real systems - not demos
• Startup, defence, aerospace, infra, fintech or hard‑tech background preferred
• High ownership, low ego, strong technical judgement

Stack

Offer

• Up to $500,000+ base + equity
• SF, Seattle or LA‑based engineers considered
• Regular NYC presence expected - relocation strongly preferred for the right person
• Small elite team
• Fast decisions, high standards, serious ownership

Process

• Technical Deep Dive
• Assessment or Live Pairing
• Founder / Team Fit

Fast: 2 weeks total.

If you’re in the top 1% of AI engineers and want to build systems that matter outside a demo environment, apply now.