Founding Member of Technical Staff, AI Infrastructure

Touchdown Labs; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Touchdown Labs seeks a founding engineer to own AI infrastructure, spanning product systems, agent workflows, evaluation, inference, and operations. You will design end-to-end workflows, including context, tools, state, agent control, APIs, data, evaluation, and deployment, ensuring dependable, measurable outcomes.

This role requires translating unclear workflows into executable requirements, maintaining correctness and operational risk, and collaborating with customers, researchers, and

Qualifications

• Strong software or systems engineering judgment and a track record of shipping products or infrastructure.
• Ability to turn unclear workflows into requirements, interfaces, tests, and an executable plan.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical layers while owning correctness and operational risk.
• Clear written communication, with decisions supported by code, traces, measurements, or user outcomes.
• Production experience with Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable language.

Responsibilities

• Work from recurring user jobs, acceptance criteria, failure modes, and operating constraints.
• Design and ship the full workflow, including context, tools, state, agent control, APIs, data, evaluation, and deployment.
• Determine whether bottlenecks call for changes to product code, workflow design, models, retrieval, inference, or infrastructure.
• Build replayable tests that cover accepted, rejected, and invalid outcomes.
• Tie technical decisions to quality, latency, reliability, cost, and the customer’s ability to operate the system.
• Provide durable code, documentation, runbooks, evidence, and handoffs that others can review and reproduce.

Skills

Software engineering judgment

Process unclear workflows into plan

Learn new technical layers

Clear written communication

Customer/researcher/engineer cross-cun

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Go

Rust

C++

Job description

Role overview

Take end-to-end ownership of AI and infrastructure problems, starting with a real user workflow and defining what a successful result looks like. This founding engineering role spans product systems, agent workflows, evaluation, inference, and operations; the focus is on delivering a dependable system that customers or internal operators can use and assess.

Responsibilities

• Work from recurring user jobs, acceptance criteria, failure modes, and operating constraints.
• Design and ship the full workflow, including context, tools, state, agent control, APIs, data, evaluation, and deployment.
• Determine whether bottlenecks call for changes to product code, workflow design, models, retrieval, inference, or infrastructure.
• Build replayable tests that cover accepted, rejected, and invalid outcomes.
• Tie technical decisions to quality, latency, reliability, cost, and the customer’s ability to operate the system.
• Provide durable code, documentation, runbooks, evidence, and handoffs that others can review and reproduce.

Requirements

• Strong software or systems engineering judgment and a track record of shipping products or infrastructure.
• Ability to turn unclear workflows into requirements, interfaces, tests, and an executable plan.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical layers while owning correctness and operational risk.
• Clear written communication, with decisions supported by code, traces, measurements, or user outcomes.
• Production experience with Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable language.
• Comfort working with customers, researchers, and engineers across technical disciplines.

Nice to have

• Experience with agent systems, ML infrastructure, evaluation, observability, developer tools, inference, distributed systems, or security and privacy boundaries.
• Experience in early-stage or zero-to-one work.