Founding Member of Technical Staff (Platform Engineering)

Founding Member of Technical Staff (Platform Engineering) I’m currently partnered with a well-funded, early-stage applied AI company building at the frontier of reinforcement learning and agentic systems for financial services. They’re working closely with leading AI labs to train models capable of performing complex, real-world tasks (think financial modelling, investment workflows, and other high-value knowledge work). The business has recently come out of a top-tier accelerator and raised seed funding, and is now scaling its founding engineering team.The Opportunity They’re looking to bring in Founding Members of Technical Staff to take ownership of platform engineering and play a key role in shaping both the product and engineering culture from day one.What You’ll Be Doing Building and scaling RL training + inference infrastructure for real-world usage Designing long-horizon, high-fidelity RL environments to push frontier models Improving the speed and quality of environment creation (10–100x focus) Developing synthetic data pipelines to simulate complex financial scenarios Creating analytics tooling across performance, cost, and operational workflows Building domain-specific evaluation systems (e.g. for modelling, presentations, trading) Helping define engineering standards, culture, and ways of working What They’re Looking For Experience with RL, evaluations, or benchmarking for AI systems Strong startup mentality — high ownership, fast iteration, low ego Product-oriented engineers who can prioritise and think commercially Comfortable engaging with users, customers, and domain experts Nice to Have Research background (e.g. training models, published work) Previous startup or founding experience Package $150k–$250k base + meaningful equity (0.25–0.50%) Strong benefits package (healthcare, meals, gym, transport, etc.) Relocation support + visa sponsorship available LocationSan Francisco (5 days onsite)