Founding AI Engineering Lead in NYC

Start: ASAPTL;DR🤝 Founding AI engineer in a leading tech role💰 Competitive base salary + significant equity stake💼 100+ paying customers, strong 6-digit ARR🧠 Building the context engine for the agentic era🤖 AI-native: you orchestrate agents, you don't just write code📍 New York City - in-office💼 Backed by unicorn founders, Axel Springer & PorscheAboutAt Along AI, we are building the modern context engine, the persistent infrastructure layer that sits between an organization's knowledge and every AI system it uses.As a Founding Engineer, you'll shape not just what we build, but how. We work in-office in New York City, move fast, and ship together.The problemThe bottleneck for AI in business was never intelligence. It was memory. It was context.Teams copy-paste background into prompts, rebuild instructions for every tool, and watch agents go off the rails because they lack institutional knowledge. Today's AI stack has a gaping hole between raw data and capable models, no persistent understanding, no living memory that compounds over time. RAG is a runtime patch, not a solution.Our solution: the Context EngineAlong AI connects to your systems of record, extracts the knowledge that matters, and organizes it into Kontext Keys — secure, self-contained units of context for a specific use case. One API serves Claude, ChatGPT, your own agents, or any tool in your stack. The same living knowledge graph powers all of them.Behind every Kontext Key is a GraphRAG-powered knowledge graph — not a flat vector database, but a structured representation of your organization's entities, relationships, and processes. Context that compounds with every interaction.What AI-native engineering means hereOrchestration over implementation — you direct agent pipelines, pick the right models, architect systems. Writing from scratch is the exception.Context engineering — you design retrieval systems, memory layers, and structured context pipelines.Eval-driven — evals before features. AI output quality is an engineering problem.Prompt as code — versioned, tested, treated with full engineering rigor.What we're looking for✅ Systems thinker - you architect before you implement✅ Hands-on LLM experience: GraphRAG, agent frameworks, prompt engineering✅ Comfortable directing AI coding agents and reviewing output at speed✅ Strong backend foundation: Node.js/TypeScript, API design, GCP/AWS✅ Experience with knowledge graphs, vector DBs, and retrieval systems✅ Shipped production AI features - not just prototypes✅ 3–5+ years engineering experience, ideally at an early-stage startup is a plus✅ Excited to work in-office in New York CityOur offerCompetitive base + significant founding equity (4yr vest, 1yr cliff)In-office in New York CityDirect access to founders, full ownership of technical direction25 days PTOISO27001, SOC2, GDPR compliant\"Working at Along feels like being part of a band at Glastonbury 🥁\"At Along AI, if you're excited about this role but don't tick every box - apply anyway.