Founding AI Engineer — Production LLMs (Equity, NYC)

Shields Group Search; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity Included

Job summary

Shields Group Search partners with a New York City–based technology company to build a corporate access platform for investment banks. We are hiring a Founding AI Engineer in New York City to own AI architecture, infrastructure, and production systems from day one.

You will ship agentic features, design robust backend AI tooling, and establish engineering patterns that scale with the team. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role guiding early AI efforts.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping LLM-powered features into production.
• Hands-on experience with frontier model prompting and prompt engineering.
• Experience designing and deploying production-ready agentic AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build production-ready agentic AI features for banking workflows.
• Own architectural decisions balancing performance, cost and maintainability.
• Design AI infrastructure including evals, guardrails, tool integrations, and observability.
• Develop backend APIs using Python, Django, and/or FastAPI, with AWS infrastructure.
• Define technical patterns and processes to support future AI team growth.
• Evaluate new AI tools, frontier models and techniques to improve the product.

Skills

LLM-powered features in production

Frontier model prompting

Agentic AI systems design

Tools

Python

Django

FastAPI

AWS

Job description

Shields Group Search partners with a New York City–based technology company to build a corporate access platform for investment banks. We are hiring a Founding AI Engineer in New York City to own AI architecture, infrastructure, and production systems from day one.

You will ship agentic features, design robust backend AI tooling, and establish engineering patterns that scale with the team. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role guiding early AI efforts.