What are the responsibilities and job description for the AI Founding Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer (LLM and Shipping) position at Avacend, Inc.?
Title: Founding Engineer
Location: NYC, NY
Duration: Full-Time
Our client is building the next generation of an autonomous workforce for the healthcare supply chain. They are looking for a Founding AI Engineer who has a proven track record of building and shipping production-grade AI applications powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous agents.
This is a highly hands-on engineering role where you will work directly with the founder to architect, build, deploy, and scale AI solutions that solve complex real-world healthcare challenges.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy production-ready AI applications using LLMs and agentic AI frameworks.
- Write, ship, and maintain production-quality code that is reliable, scalable, and customer-facing.
- Build autonomous agent systems with orchestration, state management, evaluation pipelines, observability, and robust failure handling.
- Transform customer-specific AI implementations into reusable platform capabilities and scalable product features.
- Work with large volumes of complex, unstructured healthcare data to develop intelligent automation solutions.
- Collaborate directly with the founder on technical architecture, product direction, and engineering strategy.
- Continuously improve the AI platform by implementing best practices for testing, deployment, monitoring, and performance optimization.
Required Qualifications
- Demonstrated experience shipping production code for AI/LLM-based applications that are actively used by customers or deployed in production environments.
- Proven experience building and deploying production applications using Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI agents.
- Strong hands-on experience with agent orchestration, state management, evaluation frameworks, observability, and failure recovery—not just prompt engineering.
- Excellent software engineering fundamentals with experience delivering scalable, maintainable, and production-quality code.
- Experience working in an early-stage startup or as a Founding/Early Engineer.
- Comfortable working in a small, fast-paced team and partnering directly with the founder.
Salary : $190,000 - $200,000