What are the responsibilities and job description for the AI Founding Engineer (LLM and Shipping Agents) position at Avacend, Inc.?
Founding AI Engineer – LLMs & Agentic AI
Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)
Employment Type: Full-Time (Base Salary Equity)
Experience: Startup / Early-Stage Experience Preferred
Employment Type: Full-Time (Base Salary Equity)
Experience: Startup / Early-Stage Experience Preferred
We are looking for a Founding AI Engineer to join an early-stage team and take a hands-on role in building and shipping production-grade AI systems. This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys working directly with the founder, solving complex problems, and turning customer-specific solutions into scalable platform capabilities.
What We’re Looking For
- Currently writing production code with a strong hands-on engineering focus.
- Your most recent hands-on production/shipping experience should be within the past 12 months.
- Proven production experience with LLMs and AI agents—not just prompt engineering. Experience should include agent orchestration, state management, evaluations, failure handling, and production reliability.
- Comfortable working in a small, founding-team environment with a high degree of ownership and direct collaboration with the founder.
- Demonstrated public artifacts of agentic AI work, such as:
- GitHub repositories
- Technical blog posts
- Conference or meetup talks
- Open-source contributions to projects such as LangGraph, DSPy, Inspect, Anthropic SDK, or similar ecosystems.
- Experience building Vertical AI solutions, particularly in domains such as:
- Healthcare
- Legal
- Insurance
- Finance
- Strong experience working with messy, unstructured, and complex real-world data.
- Experience transforming custom customer implementations into reusable platform primitives, frameworks, or product capabilities.
- Previous experience as an early engineer or founding engineer at a startup, ideally in a fast-paced environment where you owned significant parts of the product and technology.
Ideal Candidate
You are a hands-on AI engineer and builder, not someone focused solely on research, strategy, or prompt engineering. You enjoy taking ambiguous problems from concept to production, building reliable agentic systems, and creating reusable technology that can scale beyond individual customer engagements.
If you have production LLM/agent experience, strong engineering fundamentals, startup experience, and publicly demonstrable AI work, we’d love to hear from you.
Salary : $200,000 - $300,000