Founding AI Engineer: Production ML & Distributed Systems (Equity)

FDE Team; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

FDE Team is partnering with a trusted client in San Francisco to find a Founding AI Engineer who can bridge backend engineering and applied AI, taking ownership from problem definition through production.

This founding-level role emphasizes cross-functional collaboration with engineering and product, rather than a narrow function, and offers the opportunity to shape core systems and strategy.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of relevant engineering experience.
• 2+ years at a recognized big-tech company and 1+ year at a startup.
• Strong experience building resilient and distributed systems.
• Strong Python experience; React and experience across multiple languages are valuable.
• Hands-on experience deploying AI/ML models into production.
• Experience with LLMs, VLMs, RAG, or agentic systems.
• Strong product and engineering judgment.
• Comfort working in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• A genuine interest in taking ownership rather than waiting for detailed specifications.

Responsibilities

• Build resilient, secure, distributed backend systems.
• Deploy LLMs, VLMs, and other ML models into real-world production environments.
• Build agentic systems that can reason, plan, and take actions across data.
• Design RAG pipelines and other systems for unstructured data.
• Work with structured data, including query planning, semantic modeling, and structured reasoning.
• Work across multiple infrastructure providers and technologies.
• Own meaningful parts of what gets built and shipped.

Skills

Python

React

LLMs

VLMs

Agentic systems

Job description

FDE Team is partnering with a trusted client in San Francisco to find a Founding AI Engineer who can bridge backend engineering and applied AI, taking ownership from problem definition through production.

This founding-level role emphasizes cross-functional collaboration with engineering and product, rather than a narrow function, and offers the opportunity to shape core systems and strategy.