Founding Full-Stack AI Engineer

Creative Design Group, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision, life insurance

401(k) benefits

Job summary

Creative Design Group, Inc. invites you to join Propel Labs as the founding engineer tasked with building AI-native learning and development products. You will own data modeling, backend, AI pipeline, and the web/mobile apps end-to-end, shipping features directly with the Director of Product & AI Strategy.

As the first engineer, you’ll work hands-on to define architecture, deployment, and platform choices, with a clear path to technical leadership as the team grows and product matures.

Qualifications

• 2-3 years shipping production web applications, including at least one multi-tenant SaaS product you helped architect
• Strong TypeScript and Python proficiency with React experience for complex state management
• Relational data modeling in Postgres: schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance with tenant isolation
• Mobile delivery experience, ideally React Native or Expo with builds, store reviews, OTA updates and offline state
• Async and background processing: queues, workers, webhooks, retries, idempotency
• Cloud infrastructure and operations: containers, environments, secrets management, observability, CI/CD
• Experience building a production RAG system with chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and evaluation metrics
• Prompt and context engineering: structured outputs, tool calls, multi-step orchestration, context windows management
• Cost and latency as constraints: token budgeting, caching, streaming, routing
• Security: prompt injection, PII handling in prompts and logs
• Proficiency in Python for AI and data layer

Responsibilities

• Write majority of code for data model, backend, AI pipeline, web and mobile apps
• Own product end to end; work directly with Director of Product & AI Strategy on scope
• Collaborate with design teams on functionality and features
• Ship value quickly, with a clear path to technical leadership as Propel Labs grows

Skills

TypeScript

Python

React

PostgreSQL

React Native/Expo

Cloud & CI/CD

AI systems

Security in AI

Web app architecture

Background processing

Education

Degree in CS or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

React Native

Expo

CI/CD pipelines

Containerization (Docker)

Job description

We’re Propel Labs, the new research and development arm of leading learning and development agency Creative Design Group. Our award-winning agency designs cutting-edge learning and development solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Join us as we look to build the future of learning and development solutions!

We are building AI-native learning and development products for small and medium sized businesses. Beyond that, we keep the details close, and we will walk you through the products, the architecture, and the roadmap in detail once we are talking. What we can tell you now: there is a working product, real technical depth to the problem, and no engineering team yet.

The Role

You are the first engineering hire. You will write the majority of the code, make most of the architecture calls, and own the product end to end: data model, backend, AI pipeline, web app, mobile app, and deploys.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a management role. You will work directly with the Director of Product & AI Strategy on scope and priorities, and with our instructional design and creative teams on product functionality and features. As Propel Labs grows, there is a clear path into technical leadership, but that is earned by shipping value, not granted on day one.

Be honest with yourself about whether you want this. Founding engineer work means ambiguity, unglamorous plumbing, and a lot of decisions made with incomplete information. It also means the architecture is yours.

What You’ll Build

• The AI layer: Generation and synthesis pipelines built on frontier models, retrieval over customer-supplied documents, and the evaluation harness that keeps output quality from regressing every time we change a prompt. This is applied LLM engineering. We build on foundation models; we do not train them.
• The product surface: A multi-tenant SaaS web application plus a mobile app, along with internal authoring tools and customer-facing admin and reporting views.
• The platform underneath: Data model and tenant isolation, authentication and role-based access, background job processing for long-running generation work, usage metering (AI costs scale with usage, so this matters commercially), billing, and CI/CD.
• Ingestion: Document parsing across PDF, DOCX, and slides, plus web research to enrich generated output. Both pull in untrusted content, so both need to be handled defensively.

What We’re Looking For

• 2-3 years shipping production web applications, including at least one multi-tenant SaaS product you helped architect rather than inherited.
• Strong TypeScript and Python. Strong React experience - complex state, data fetching and caching, and keeping a large single-page app fast and maintainable.
• Relational data modeling in Postgres: schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance. You can explain how you would enforce tenant isolation and why you chose that approach.
• Mobile delivery experience, ideally React Native or Expo, including the parts people underestimate (builds, store review, OTA updates, offline state).
• Async and background processing: queues, workers, webhooks, retries, idempotency. Generation jobs take minutes, not milliseconds.
• Cloud infrastructure and operations: containers, environments, secrets management, observability, CI/CD. You have been on call for something you built.
• You have built and shipped a production RAG system, not a demo. You can talk specifically about chunking strategy, embedding model choice, hybrid search versus pure vector search, reranking, and how you measured whether retrieval was actually working.
• Prompt and context engineering as an engineering discipline: structured outputs, tool and function calling, multi-step orchestration, managing context windows, and making non-deterministic output behave inside a system that has to be reliable.
• Evaluation. You have built golden datasets and regression tests for LLM output, and you have opinions about where LLM-as-judge is useful and where it lies to you.
• Cost and latency as first-class constraints: token budgeting, caching, streaming, model routing, knowing when the cheap model is sufficient.
• Security in AI systems, specifically prompt injection through parsed documents and scraped web content, plus PII handling in prompts and logs.
• Comfortable in Python for the AI and data layer.

How you work

• You use AI coding tools aggressively and well. This is not a preference, it is how we operate. We expect you to ship at a pace that assumes them, and to know where they produce confidently wrong code that needs a human.
• You can explain a technical tradeoff to a non-technical stakeholder without condescension or hand-waving. You will be doing this constantly.
• You make good decisions with incomplete requirements, and you ask rather than guess when the stakes are high.
• You care about the outcome for the end user, not just closing the ticket.

Degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. We care about what you have built.

Nice to Have

• EdTech, HR tech, or LMS experience, including standards like SCORM or xAPI
• Row-level security policy design at scale
• Event pipelines and analytics: turning behavioral data into something a customer will act on
• Early-stage or founding-engineer experience

Your First Six Months

• Month 1: Get deep in the existing codebase and product. Deliver an honest technical assessment: what to keep, what to rebuild, what will break at scale
• Months 2-3: Own and ship a significant feature end to end. Establish the evaluation harness for AI output quality
• Months 4-6: Harden the platform for real customers. Multi-tenant security, usage metering, monitoring, and a deploy process you trust on a Friday

Compensation and Benefits

• $100,000.00 - $120,000.00 annually, plus bonus and future equity participation opportunities
• Health, dental, vision, life insurance and 401(k) benefits

You are joining an established, profitable agency with a long client history, not a company with 14 months of runway, and you are building the thing meant to become its next act.