Founding Engineer
(Product, Data & Agentic AI)
Compensation: $160,000–$180,000 base plus Equity
Location: New York City – hybrid, minimum three days per week in office
The Company
A well-funded healthcare AI startup is building a revenue integrity platform for complex provider organisations. Its product brings fragmented contract, claims and payment data together to identify underpayments and support evidence-backed recovery through intelligent automation.
The founders combine deep healthcare operations, machine learning and early-stage company-building experience. Customer demand is developing quickly, making engineering capacity the company’s immediate priority.
The Opportunity
This is the first full-time engineering hire and one of the most important appointments the company will make. You will help establish the technical foundation, product quality bar and engineering culture that future hires inherit.
The role offers substantial hands-on ownership across data, AI systems, architecture and customer-facing product development, alongside meaningful early-stage equity.
The Role
You will own correctness across a product that turns messy financial and operational data into trusted, actionable recovery opportunities. Working directly with the CTO and customers, you will build systems that are technically robust, commercially useful and simple enough for non-technical users to trust.
This is not a narrowly defined backend, frontend or AI role. It is a founding product-engineering position for someone who wants to solve the highest-priority problem in front of the business.
What You’ll Do
Build and scale data pipelines and integrations across contracts, claims, remittance and payment information.
Design systems that compare expected contractual payments with actual outcomes and surface valid recovery opportunities.
Develop and improve agentic workflows that assemble evidence, generate appeal materials and support recovery processes.
Create evaluation, validation and monitoring systems that identify model or agent failures before customers rely on the output.
Partner directly with customers to understand operational problems and translate them into simple, low-touch product experiences.
Architect secure multi-tenant systems with appropriate data separation, encryption and access controls.
Help define engineering standards, review future technical work and shape the next several engineering hires.
What You’ll Bring
Strong senior-level experience building and owning production software systems.
Evidence of shipping products to real customers, learning from failures and iterating quickly.
Experience operating in an early-stage startup or another environment with significant ambiguity and individual ownership.
A modern AI-enabled development workflow, combined with disciplined evaluation and validation of generated output.
Strong product judgement and the ability to reduce technically complex workflows into clear user experiences.
Confidence communicating with customers and stakeholders who may not be technical or immediately comfortable with AI.
Mentoring, technical leadership or early team-building experience is highly valued.
What This Role Requires
At least four to five years of substantive senior or staff-calibre individual-contributor engineering experience.
The ability to make sound architectural decisions while remaining deeply hands-on.
Genuine experience using AI tools and models to build faster, not simply surface-level familiarity.
A willingness to work from the New York City office at least three days per week.
The ownership mindset required to investigate problems, develop solutions and move work forward without constant direction.
Tech Stack
Agentic AI workflows and model evaluation
Data engineering and third-party integrations
Claims, remittance and contract-processing systems
Secure multi-tenant architecture
Encryption, permissions and protected-data handling
Specific language, framework and infrastructure details will be discussed during the process.
Why Join
Become the first full-time engineer and directly shape the product, architecture, engineering culture and future team.
Solve a technically complex, commercially valuable problem involving fragmented data, intelligent automation and highly trust-sensitive users.
Receive meaningful percentage ownership at a well-funded early-stage company with active customer demand.
About People in AI
People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.
