Founding AI Platform Engineer - Build Core Infrastructure

Shields Group Search; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding equity

Job summary

Shields Group Search is seeking a Founding Engineer for an early-stage AI startup operating across SF or NYC. You will build production-grade infrastructure and industry-specific applications, working directly with the founder and early customers on site.

This hands-on role requires owning broad parts of the stack, shaping architecture, and defining patterns for a scalable product. Equity is offered; ideal for someone who thrives in small teams and on-site collaboration in San Francisco or New

Qualifications

• 4+ years shipping production software end-to-end.
• Strong backend and systems architecture orientation.
• Experience building or standing up new systems from 0-1.
• Fundamentals in data modeling, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building backend-heavy or data-heavy applications.
• Hands-on with LLM-powered systems — harnesses, prompts, tools, evals.
• Comfortable building agentic systems with experimentation and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Build platform across core modules — harnesses, tools, traces, governance, cost, and integrations.
• Ship production AI applications for customers and own adoption.
• Make agents reliable with evals, traces, and guardrails.
• Integrate ERPs, CRMs, data warehouses, spreadsheets, and other systems.
• Work with customers on-site and over calls to translate needs into shipped changes.
• Build patterns into the product by reusing insights from deployments.
• Help hire and raise the level of engineering as the company grows.

Skills

Backend systems

Data modeling

APIs

Cloud infrastructure

LLM-powered systems

Agentic systems

Product mindset

Communication

Startup experience

Customer discovery

Tools

ERP integration

Job description

Shields Group Search is seeking a Founding Engineer for an early-stage AI startup operating across SF or NYC. You will build production-grade infrastructure and industry-specific applications, working directly with the founder and early customers on site.

This hands-on role requires owning broad parts of the stack, shaping architecture, and defining patterns for a scalable product. Equity is offered; ideal for someone who thrives in small teams and on-site collaboration in San Francisco or New