Founding Engineer Lead – AI‑Native, NYC, Equity

Altis; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Altis is building its Founding Engineering team in New York City to own major parts of the tech stack and accelerate product offerings. You’ll report to the CEO and help scale the engineering function from 2 to roughly 10 engineers, shaping a roadmap closely tied to speeding up research processes.

This in-person role requires a product-minded engineer with a track record of shipping user-facing software, strong delivery discipline, and experience with AI-native or RAG-powered products.

Qualifications

• Track record of shipping software that users actually adopt.
• Comfort owning and communicating delivery timelines, including flagging risk.
• Strong communication with both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders, including a CEO.
• Experience with AI-native, LLM- or RAG-powered products.

Responsibilities

• Help share and own the roadmap and delivery of Altis’s internal research-enablement tooling - sit with the research and sourcing teams to understand their real workflows, with a goal of meaningfully cutting the time it takes them to produce a report
• Commit to delivery dates for engineering’s key initiatives, hit them, or flag slippage early and clearly
• Partner with our existing engineering team on architecture decisions, including Altis’s move toward direct API/MCP access for customers
• Report directly to the CEO as a technical thought partner on product and roadmap tradeoffs
• Stand up the engineering processes (planning, review, ownership) a growing team needs
• Help design and run the technical interview process as the team scales

Skills

Shipping software

Delivery ownership

Strong communication

AI-native products

Tools

API design

Job description

Altis is building its Founding Engineering team in New York City to own major parts of the tech stack and accelerate product offerings. You’ll report to the CEO and help scale the engineering function from 2 to roughly 10 engineers, shaping a roadmap closely tied to speeding up research processes.

This in-person role requires a product-minded engineer with a track record of shipping user-facing software, strong delivery discipline, and experience with AI-native or RAG-powered products.