Founding Lead Engineer

Founding Lead EngineerLocation: Remote (USA)Salary: Up to $220,000 + EquityIndustry: AI / M&AWho You'll JoinJoin an early-stage AI company building the platform that redefines how diligence and M&A workflows are done. The founder, a former partner from a leading strategy firm, left the industry to fix what he saw firsthand: outdated, manual, and analyst-heavy processes slowing down private equity and advisory teams. The platform already exists and serves as a unified workspace for market research, document analysis, analytics, and insights generation across large data sets.This is not an idea-stage concept. The product is live, around 85% reliable, and being prepared for commercialization. You'll work directly with the founder to stabilize, productionize, and scale an AI-native platform trusted by middle-market private equity firms and professional services teams who want to evaluate businesses faster and with more confidence.What You'll DoLead stabilization, refinement, and reliability improvements across the platform.Build flexible, scalable infrastructure for integrated AI research and analysis workflows.Strengthen data permissioning, collaboration, and security foundations to prepare for enterprise rollout.Identify performance bottlenecks, drive observability, and chart a path toward SOC 2 readiness.Refactor partially built modules such as a dataset querying feature and turn them into commercial use cases.Define early engineering standards, development processes, and best practices for a future team.Collaborate closely with the founder to set technical direction and product priorities.Who You AreSenior or Staff-level engineer with strong full stack or backend experience.Experienced in startup or AI product environments where structure and clarity are still being built.Great communicator who can translate between technical context and business goals.Ownership-driven, pragmatic, and comfortable building in ambiguity.Product-minded engineer who enjoys AI-assisted development and working close to end users.Bonus: experience with information retrieval, data infrastructure, or enterprise AI workflows.Tech StackReact, Next.js, Python, AWS, Terraform, vector databases, and knowledge graph infrastructure.Why You'll ThriveBuild on a real foundation: the platform already exists and is being used in diligence settings.Shape the architecture and technical culture as the first engineering hire.Partner directly with a domain expert founder who has deep PE and consulting relationships.Solve a high-value, visible problem that sits at the intersection of AI, data analysis, and investment workflows.Potential to evolve into Head of Engineering or CTO as the company scales.Remote flexibility with strong agency and clarity of ownership.Backed by early revenue from consulting and a $2–2.5M seed raise now in motion.This role is open to US citizens and Green Card holders only.