Founding Member of Technical Staff — Back-end / Systems Engineering

HRB; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a Founding Member of Technical Staff specializing in back-end and systems engineering. This exciting role involves working with cutting-edge technology, particularly in Rust, to enhance LLM applications. You will be part of a small, technical team focused on open-source contributions and personal growth. With a competitive compensation package and opportunities for learning, this position is ideal for those eager to make a significant impact in a dynamic environment. Join a dedicated team in NYC and help shape the future of technology while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Open-source contributions

Learning and growth opportunities

Small, technical, in-person team

Best-in-class investors

Qualifications

• Strong technical background with experience in systems engineering.
• Comfortable driving large projects from inception to deployment.

Responsibilities

• Integrate model gateway and optimize inference strategies.
• Work on features like dynamic in-context learning and A/B testing.

Skills

Rust

Back-end Development

Systems Engineering

Technical Leadership

Education

PhD in Reinforcement Learning

Job description

GreenFoot Technologies is searching for a Founding Member of Technical Staff — Back-end / Systems Engineering for our New York City based Client. Our Client is an open-source platform that creates a feedback loop for optimizing LLM applications — turning production data into smarter, faster, and cheaper models. $200K – $250K

1. Integrate their model gateway
2. Send metrics or feedback
3. Optimize prompts, models, and inference strategies
4. Watch your LLMs improve over time

It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying:

1. Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead
2. Observability: inference & feedback → your database
3. Optimization: from prompts to fine-tuning and RL (& even ?)
4. Experimentation: built-in A/B testing, routing, fallbacks

Role

Our client is looking for a Founding Member of Technical Staff with a background in systems engineering (esp. Rust).

Why not “engineer”? They are not going to make a distinction between engineers and researchers to encourage people to have cross-functional scope and impact. Their CTO has a PhD in reinforcement learning but also writes infrastructure code in Rust.

Their model gateway, written in Rust, is the backbone of the project. As a preview, if you joined today, you'd work on features ranging from inference-time optimizations (e.g. dynamic in-context learning) to advanced experimentation ("built-in Statsig").

They Are Looking For

• Strong technical background — You’ve tackled hard technical problems. You’re comfortable driving large projects from inception to deployment.

• Background in back-end / systems SWE — You’ll complement the team with a strong background and technical leadership (esp. Rust).

• Hungry for personal growth — There are no speed limits. You’re excited about learning and contributing across the stack.

In-person in NYC — They work in-person five days a week in NYC. They work hard and obsess about the craft – but maintain and encourage a healthy lifestyle with a long-term mindset.

What They Offer

Competitive compensation — We believe that great talent deserves great compensation (salary, equity, benefits), even at an early-stage startup.

• Open-source contributions — The vast majority of your work will be open-source and public.

• Learning and growth opportunities — You’ll join with a background in back-end / systems but will have the opportunity (& be encouraged) to expand your skill set way beyond that (curious about ML?).

• Small, technical, in-person team — You’ll work alongside a 100% technical team and help shape our vision, culture, and engineering practices.

• Best-in-class investors — They are lucky to be backed by leading funds like FirstMark (backed ClickHouse), Bessemer (backed Anthropic), Bedrock (backed OpenAI), and many angels. We have years of runway and a long-term mindset.