Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Founding Engineer (AI Agents / Applied AI)📍 San Francisco Bay AreaWe’re partnering with an early-stage company building agentic AI systems for complex, real-world operations — turning fragmented, messy data into instant, reliable intelligence that enables AI to reason and act in high-stakes environments.This is a true 0→1 founding engineer role, ideal for someone who wants to define the technical foundation from the ground up, not inherit it. You’ll work directly with the founders to design and ship production-grade systems that transform real-world workflows at scale.What You’ll DoDesign and build multi-agent systems that reason across messy, real-world dataOwn end-to-end AI pipelines (data → retrieval → orchestration → output)Develop evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and quality loops to ensure reliabilityBuild and scale data ingestion + retrieval infrastructureShip full-stack product features in close collaboration with usersHelp define technical architecture, product direction, and engineering cultureWhat We’re Looking ForProven startup experience — comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and ownershipExperience shipping production-grade AI systems (not just experimentation)Strong hands-on experience with:Agent architectures / LLM systems / RAG pipelinesRetrieval, grounding, and orchestrationBuilder mentality — bias for action and shippingAbility to operate full-stack and own systems end-to-endStrong data instincts — experience working with messy, real-world datasetsNice to HaveExperience with evals frameworks and AI quality measurementBackground in AI infrastructure or distributed systemsExposure to automotive, logistics, or other physical-world systemsMLOps / DevOps experience (CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes)Former founder or early employee at a startupWhy This RoleDefine the core AI systems of the company from the ground upWork on problems where AI meets the physical worldHigh ownership, high impact — your work ships immediatelySmall, sharp team operating at the frontier