Founding AI Engineer (Founding Engineer, AI Agents)
$200,000 to $225,000 base + meaningful equity
Remote (US time zones preferred)
AI agents for real assets
A stealth, venture-backed startup is building AI “employees” for the teams responsible for developing large physical projects across North America. Think institutional real estate developers, asset managers, and operators managing billions in AUM. The work is deeply practical: long-lived agent workflows, messy real-world documents, and enterprise-grade constraints where reliability matters.
You will be the first full-time engineering hire, partnering directly with the founding team to ship production agents end to end. This role is on a fast path to Head of Engineering for the right person.
Responsibilities
- Build and ship agent-based systems that run long-lived, stateful workflows in production
- Own document ingestion and pipelines across PDFs, policies, drawings, spreadsheets, and emails
- Design retrieval, reasoning, and evaluation layers that improve continuously in production
- Build secure, multi-tenant infrastructure patterns suitable for enterprise customers
- Deliver customer-facing product surfaces and internal tools that help a very small team ship extremely fast
- Work directly with early customers to translate real workflows into productized agent capabilities
Tech Stack and Environment
- Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, modern React
- Backend: TypeScript and Python services
- AI: Claude and OpenAI, multi-agent systems, structured outputs, evaluation pipelines
- Agent tooling: LangGraph, Claude agent SDKs, MCP tools, emerging agent runtimes
- Infra: cloud-native deployment, CI/CD, monitoring, security-first design
- Developer workflow: Cursor, Claude Code, internal coding agents used daily
What we’re looking for
- Proven experience building and shipping AI agents to production (not just prototypes)
- Strong software fundamentals and good systems intuition
- Comfort owning deployment, reliability, and security decisions when needed
- Experience with document-heavy workflows and data processing
- High ownership and high agency: you focus on outcomes, not just tickets
- AI-native builder who adopts new tools fast and iterates quickly
Why this role
- First engineering hire with direct ownership over what ships and how it scales
- Greenfield product space with real enterprise pull and concrete workflows
- Work on agents that do real jobs end to end, not just chat interfaces
- High upside: early stage, meaningful equity, and career-defining scope
Interview Process
- Initial conversation with the CEO (fit, motivation, startup appetite)
- Technical session with the technical founder (often practical and collaborative, focused on real work)
- Team conversation to align on working style and answer your questions
- A take-home may be used depending on pipeline volume, but the goal is to keep the process tight and relevant
About People In AI
People In AI is a specialist recruiting partner focused on top AI and technical talent. We work closely with both candidates and hiring teams to provide clear context, tight process management, and honest guidance so you can make a confident decision without unnecessary noise.
