Founding Engineer

Applied Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Significant equity

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Medical, Dental, Vision benefits

Relocation support

Fancy lunches and snacks

Job summary

An innovative tech company in New York City is seeking a candidate to own core agent systems from conception to production, ensuring reliability and efficiency. The ideal applicant has experience with end-to-end system shipping and is passionate about using metrics to evaluate success. This role emphasizes in-person collaboration and offers ownership in defining the engineering culture of a rapidly growing organization. Competitive salary and benefits, including equity and unlimited PTO, are provided.

Qualifications

• Have shipped production systems end-to-end and love owning outcomes.
• Care deeply about reliability; tests, evals, and metrics matter.
• Are product-minded and aim to build the simplest effective solution.
• Prefer in-person collaboration and fast decision cycles.
• Want to help define the engineering culture at a rapidly scaling company.

Responsibilities

• Own core agent systems from idea to production: orchestration, planning, and evaluation.
• Architect for reliability by designing loops and guardrails for edge cases.
• Run experiments, measure outcomes, and iterate quickly.
• Collaborate with founders to set product direction and culture.
• Establish blueprint standards for design decisions and code style.

Skills

Production systems

Reliability focus

Product-mindedness

In-person collaboration

Engineering culture definition

Tools

Python

Go

React

Clickhouse

K8s

Bazel

Postgres

GCP

Modal

Job description

About us

• At Applied Labs, we’re building the platform for reliable AI agents that automate complex work. We are primarily an in-person company based in New York City.

Why this could be a fit

• Trajectory: 10x growth in 4 months; strong momentum.

• Ownership: High autonomy; own systems end‑to‑end.

• Challenging problems: Design novel, reliable solutions for complex tasks.

• Team quality: Early team from Harvard, MIT, Gemini, Meta.

What you’ll do

• Own core agent systems from idea to production: orchestration, tool‑use, planning, memory, evals.

• Architect for reliability: design agent loops and guardrails that hold up under real‑world edge cases.

• Ship fast, learn faster: run experiments, measure outcomes, iterate weekly.

• Collaborate tightly with the founders in NYC to set product direction, quality bars, and engineering culture.

• Set the blueprint: your design decisions, documents, and code style become the standard for future hires.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have shipped production systems end‑to‑end and love owning outcomes.

• Care deeply about reliability, not just demos - tests, evals, and metrics matter to you.

• Are product‑minded: you ask “what does the user need?” and then build the simplest thing that works.

• Prefer in‑person collaboration and fast decision cycles.

• Want to help define the engineering culture at a company that’s scaling quickly.

Our tools

• We currently build with Python, Go, React, Clickhouse, K8s, Bazel, Postgres, GCP, Modal

• We hire for ability, not checklists.

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive salary + significant equity

• Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family

• Fancy lunches (think Nubiani), as well as snacks, coffee, or boba that always hits the spot

• Relocation support to NYC if needed.

Apply

• Send a short note and your LinkedIn/GitHub to [e-mail] (or apply on our site).