Founding Engineer

Cymon AI; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative AI startup is seeking a Founding Engineer to design and build foundational real-time AI systems. This hands-on role requires expertise in full-stack engineering and a strong understanding of distributed systems. You will work closely with the founding team, influencing product direction while building core systems that ensure performance, reliability, and enterprise readiness. Ideal candidates have over 7 years of experience and a passion for creating impactful technology.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a full-stack engineer.
• Experience in building and debugging distributed systems in production.
• Strong understanding of authentication and security requirements.
• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, from design through deployment.

Responsibilities

• Ship high-quality production code across backend and frontend services.
• Partner closely with product and leadership to translate ideas into capabilities.
• Identify and remove bottlenecks in real-time workflows.
• Establish clean architectural patterns and engineering standards.

Skills

Distributed systems debugging

Real-time system design

Full-stack engineering

Cloud-native architecture

Technical leadership

Job description

Founding Engineer (Full Stack / Real-Time AI Systems)

Location: US Remote/Hybrid ( NJ/NY area preferred)

Stage: Early-stage, AI-native startup

Reports to: Co-Founder & CTO

About Cymon AI

Cymon AI is building a new category of real-time, AI-native intelligence that operates inside live customer conversations. Our platform augments technical experts and solution teams with instant, context-aware answers during high-stakes moments.

We are moving quickly from MVP to enterprise deployment and are backed by strong early customer demand. This is a rare opportunity to help define both the technical foundation and the product direction of a deeply ambitious system.

The Role

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer who thrives in complex, real-time systems and wants to build something foundational from the ground up.

You’ll work directly with the founders to design, build, and scale a multi-service platform that blends real-time communication, AI systems, and enterprise-grade reliability. This is a hands-on role for someone who loves shipping production code, solving hard problems, and setting engineering standards that will scale with the company.

This is not a “feature factory” role. You will help define how the platform works, how it scales, and how it evolves.

What You’ll Work On

• Designing and building real-time, low-latency systems that operate inside live conversations
• Developing and scaling a modern full-stack platform (backend services, frontend applications, APIs)
• Building secure, enterprise-ready integrations with widely used collaboration and sales platforms
• Working on AI-powered ingestion and retrieval workflows that support domain-specific knowledge at scale
• Owning reliability, observability, performance, and production readiness
• Helping establish architecture, environments, and engineering best practices as the team grows

You will have direct influence over product direction, system design, and long-term technical decisions.

Responsibilities

Build & Scale Core Systems

• Ship high-quality production code across backend and frontend services
• Design and evolve event-driven and service-oriented components
• Build systems that prioritize performance, resilience, and correctness
• Partner closely with product and leadership to translate ideas into shipped capabilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Evaluate existing systems and improve scalability and maintainability
• Establish clean architectural patterns and engineering standards
• Help define environments, deployment workflows, and release processes
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, and long-term scalability

Reliability & Performance

• Identify and remove bottlenecks in real-time workflows
>Improve latency, fault tolerance, and system visibility
• Build and maintain metrics, logging, and alerting that support enterprise usage

Ideal Background

• Required 7+ years of experience as a full-stack engineer
• Experience building and debugging distributed systems in production
• Experience designing systems that integrate with external platforms or APIs
• Strong understanding of authentication, security, and enterprise-grade requirements
• Comfort owning systems end-to-end, from design through deployment

Nice to Have

• Experience with real-time audio/video or streaming systems
• Experience working with AI-powered retrieval, knowledge systems, or data pipelines
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and containerized environments
• Prior experience as a founding engineer or early-stage startup contributor
• Experience building systems that must meet compliance or regulatory standards

What We’re Looking For (Mindset)

• High ownership and bias toward action
• Strong product intuition paired with engineering rigor
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and shaping systems that don’t yet exist
• Clear communicator who documents decisions and tradeoffs
• Passion for building technically ambitious, category-defining products