Software Engineer, AI/ML New York City

Kya; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & dental insurance

Lunch & dinner

In-person energy

Competitive cash and equity compensation

Job summary

Kya, located in New York, is hiring for a founding engineering role to build AI that powers customer success. You will design and implement systems that manage customer accounts reliably, owning the projects from start to finish.

The ideal candidate has over 4 years of software engineering experience, specializing in production code and LLM technologies. Benefits include health insurance and competitive compensation.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in building and shipping production software.
• Hands-on experience with LLM or ML-powered features.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and API design.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the agent platform for customer data handling.
• Build the memory and retrieval layer for agent learning.
• Integrate and orchestrate LLMs for production.
• Establish evaluation and observability systems for performance.
• Ship production services with APIs and infrastructure.

Skills

Software engineering

Production code shipping

LLM APIs and tools

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

API design

Rapid iteration

Customer Success knowledge

Job description

About Kya

Kya is your customer success agent. We build AI agents that onboard, activate, and expand customer accounts while teams focus on the relationships, turning customer success into an operating system for growth. We're an agent-native company with a high bar for everything, and we believe a job was never meant to be the busywork. It was meant to be the thinking and the building. Every action our product takes makes it better at the next one, and we're hiring the engineers who make that compounding loop real.

The role

You’ll build the AI that runs Kya. That means the agent runtime, the memory and retrieval systems, the evaluation harnesses, and the model orchestration that lets agents take real actions on real customer accounts safely and reliably. This is a founding engineering role: you’ll own systems end to end, make architectural calls that stick for years, and ship them to production where customers and their revenue depend on them. You’ll work directly with the founders and the people closest to our customers, and the loop from idea to shipped agent is short by design.

What you’ll do

• Design and build the agent platform: planning, tool use, orchestration, and the guardrails that keep agents acting safely on customer data.
• Build the memory and retrieval layer that lets agents learn a customer’s playbooks and get smarter with every account.
• Integrate and orchestrate LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, and others), and own prompting, context engineering, routing, and cost and latency tradeoffs in production.
• Stand up the evaluation and observability systems that tell us whether an agent is actually getting better, and catch regressions before customers do.
• Ship production services: the APIs, pipelines, and infrastructure behind agents that take millions of actions across our customers’ stacks.
• Use Kya to build Kya, and turn what you learn into the next version of the platform.

What we’re looking for

• A strong software engineer who ships. You write production code, own systems end to end, and care about correctness, latency, and cost in the real world.
• 4+ years building and shipping production software, with hands‑on experience putting LLM‑ or ML‑powered features in front of real users.
• Real fluency with the modern AI stack: LLM APIs, RAG and retrieval, agent and tool‑use patterns, and evaluation.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data pipelines, and API design.
• A bias toward shipping and iterating fast, and the judgment to know where reliability and safety can’t be cut.
• Genuine excitement about agents, and about being early at a company building them.

Nice to have

• Experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup.
• Experience with agent frameworks, vector databases, or building evaluation harnesses from scratch.
• Familiarity with CRM, support, or customer success data and integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack).
• Open‑source work, side projects, or shipped agents you can show us.

Benefits

• Health & dental insurance
• Lunch & dinner
• In‑person energy
• Competitive cash and equity compensation