What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer position at Stealth AI Start-Up?
Location: NYC (in-person collaboration required)
Stage: Early, revenue-oriented
Role: First technical hire
We believe AI is ushering in an age of abundance — not by replacing people, but by expanding what small, focused teams can accomplish.
Modern enterprises are constrained by manual processes, fragmented systems, and cognitive overhead. AI agents change that. When designed well, they take ownership of workflows end-to-end, freeing people to operate at a higher level of judgment and creativity.
Our mission is to help corporations navigate this transition responsibly, by building production-grade AI agents that are reliable, auditable, and grounded in real business outcomes. We are building for the long term.
We are hiring a Founding Engineer who will operate as a technical cofounder in practice, working directly with the CEO to shape both the product and the business.
You will have primary ownership over engineering and significant influence over product direction. This is a role for someone who wants to build the core of the company, not just write code.
We value long-term thinking, technical judgment, and craft over speed for speed’s sake.
- Own the technical architecture end-to-end
- Design and build AI agents that operate inside real enterprise workflows
- Make core decisions across product, engineering, and system design
- Work closely with the CEO to shape company strategy, positioning, and roadmap
- Translate customer needs into durable product capabilities
- Establish engineering standards, patterns, and culture
- Hire and lead additional engineers over time, as the team grows
- 6 years of engineering experience
- Strong background across product, engineering, and design collaboration
- Proven ability to ship and operate production software
- Deep, hands-on immersion in AI already (Actively explores new models when released; Understands strengths, limitations, and tradeoffs of modern AI systems; Has opinions about agent architectures, tooling, and evaluation
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity with high ownership
- Strong communicator who enjoys collaborating closely with customers and leadership
- Excited to help define how AI shows up in the enterprise over the next decade
We work with legal, finance, and operations leaders, which means building within real constraints: security, reliability, auditability, and trust. This is not consumer software, and it is not research — it is production systems with real consequences.
We care deeply about:
- correctness over cleverness
- durability over demos
- long-term leverage over short-term hacks
This is a foundational role and is structured accordingly:
- Solid, market-credible cash compensation
- Meaningful equity ownership
- Clear scope, authority, and long-term upside
- We want this to be a role you can commit to for years, not the next 12 months.
- Work directly with an experienced founding team
- Own the core of a company at the moment AI is reshaping how work gets done
- Help enterprises adopt AI in a way that actually works
- Build something enduring, with people who value expertise and judgment
- A prompt-engineering position
- A research lab role
- A short-term or purely transactional engagement
This is a build-the-company role.