What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding AI Engineer position at People In AI?
Founding AI Engineer
$180,000–$220,000 Equity
New York City
About the Company
Our client is an AI-native fintech startup modernizing a critical but overlooked part of the capital markets ecosystem. By combining large-scale document intelligence, retrieval systems, and explainable AI, they're helping institutional investors make faster, more transparent, and more customizable decisions.
Backed by experienced founders, strong early funding, and growing customer demand, they're building toward a major product launch and looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help shape the platform from the ground up.
The Role
As a Founding AI Engineer, you'll work directly with the CTO to build the core systems powering the business.
This is a backend-first role with significant exposure to AI infrastructure, spanning APIs, data pipelines, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, and cloud architecture. You'll have real ownership over technical decisions and help establish the foundation the future engineering team will build upon.
What You'll Do
- Build and scale backend services, APIs, and data infrastructure
- Develop ingestion pipelines for complex document and data sources
- Design and improve RAG and AI-powered workflows
- Build evaluation, monitoring, and observability systems
- Make key architectural decisions across the platform
- Partner closely with founders to shape product and technical strategy
What You'll Bring
- Experience building and shipping production backend systems
- Strong knowledge of APIs, data modelling, and distributed systems
- Startup experience and a track record of building from scratch
- Hands-on experience deploying AI-powered products or features
- Familiarity with RAG, vector databases, agentic workflows, or LLM evaluation
- Strong ownership mentality and comfort working in ambiguity
Tech Stack
- TypeScript
- Node.js / NestJS
- Python
- AWS
- LLMs
- RAG
- Vector Databases
Why Join?
- Join as a founding engineer with significant ownership and influence
- Work directly with the CTO and founding team
- Build an AI-native product from zero-to-one
- Shape architecture, product direction, and engineering culture
- Competitive compensation and meaningful equity upside
About People In AI
People In AI partners with the world's most ambitious AI companies, helping them build exceptional teams across engineering, machine learning, infrastructure, data, and product.
Salary : $180,000 - $220,000