Demo

Founding AI Engineer

BJAK
York, NY Full Time
POSTED ON 12/4/2025 CLOSED ON 1/2/2026

What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding AI Engineer position at BJAK?

Transform Language Models Into Real-world, High-impact Product Experiences.

A1 is a self-funded AI division backed by BJAK, operating in full stealth. We’re building a new global consumer AI application focused on an important but underexplored use case — something practical, meaningful, and far beyond the typical chatbot or productivity agent.

As a Founding AI Engineer, you will work at the core of our product: fine-tuning frontier-level models, shaping data pipelines, evaluating behavior, and bringing intelligent features into real production environments. You’ll operate with high autonomy within a small, deeply technical team.

Why This Role Matters

  • You will turn state-of-the-art models into real product capabilities used by a global audience.
  • You’ll define how our models behave — accuracy, safety, tone, and user experience.
  • You’ll help build a new consumer AI product from zero, directly influencing its technical and product direction.
  • Your work will ensure our models are not only powerful, but safe, reliable, and impactful at scale.

What You’ll Do

  • Fine-tune and adapt models as needed while also designing new model architectures and training pipelines from scratch
  • Design and curate datasets, craft prompts, and experiment with alignment and safety strategies for high-quality outputs.
  • Build evaluation pipelines for model performance, safety, and alignment, and innovate on new metrics for real-world impact.
  • Ship models to production, optimise for latency and scale, and monitor drift or degradation
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and design to launch polished, user-facing AI features
  • Explore new modeling approaches, optimisation methods, and product use cases

What It’s Like To Work Here

  • You take ownership - you solve problems end-to-end rather than wait for perfect instructions
  • You learn through action - prototype → test → iterate → ship
  • You’re calm in ambiguity - zero-to-one building energises you
  • You bias toward speed with discipline - V1 now > perfect later
  • You see failures and feedback as essential to growth
  • You work with humility, curiosity, and a founder’s mindset
  • You lift the bar for yourself and your teammates every day

Requirements

  • Strong experience with transformers, deep learning, and fine-tuning methods (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, distillation)
  • Proficiency in PyTorch (preferred) or TensorFlow
  • Experience in prompt engineering and dataset creation for alignment, tone, trust, and safety
  • Familiarity with evaluation methods: perplexity, toxicity, relevance, robustness
  • Solid software engineering fundamentals — algorithms, data structures, clean code
  • Ability to operate in a fast, lean, and high-ownership environment

Nice to Have

  • Experience with text generation, moderation, ranking, or personalisation
  • Exposure to RLHF or reinforcement learning for LLMs
  • Contributions to open-source ML projects
  • Background in consumer-facing AI products or high-growth startups

What You’ll Get

  • High ownership and autonomy from day one
  • Direct involvement in technical direction and product decisions
  • Remote-first flexibility
  • A high-impact role with visibility across ML, engineering, and product
  • Competitive compensation and performance-based bonuses
  • Backing of a profitable US$2B group, with the speed of a startup
  • Insurance coverage, flexible time off, and global travel insurance
  • Opportunity to shape a new global AI product from zero

Our Team & Culture

We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders — we build, ship, iterate, and hold ourselves to a high technical bar.

If you value excellence, enjoy building real systems, and want to be part of a small team creating something globally impactful, you’ll thrive here.

About A1

A1 is a self-funded, independent AI division under BJAK, focused on building a new consumer AI product with global relevance. We’re in full stealth and assembling a small, elite team of ML and engineering builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems.

Salary.com Estimation for Founding AI Engineer in York, NY
$139,402 to $168,742
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