Founding Applied AI Engineer — Early Career

Build AI agents accountants and business owners can trust with real work.

ABOUT UNITED

United's mission is to save people from boring work, starting with SMB accounting. We believe now is the perfect time to bring AI into traditional service industries and fundamentally transform how they operate: services will become a new software.

We’re building Codex/Claude for accountants: AI agents & workflows handle 90% of the workload, with real accountants orchestrating the work and owning client relationships.

Founding team:

CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-paadam/

CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-potapoff/

THE ROLE

We are hiring a founding, hands-on engineer to build production AI agents and workflows. These systems operate on real financial data and documents, so correctness, auditability, explainability, and recovery matter as much as model capability.

You will own systems end to end: from prototypes and evaluations through deployment, observability, and iteration with accountants. You will work directly with the founders and operators across our CPA-firm network, with unusual access to live workflows and domain expertise.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Architecting and building AI systems. You decide what context and tools our agents need, how they are structured, how they interact with semi-deterministic workflows, and what each layer produces.

Defining the boundary between deterministic and nondeterministic logic. You decide which logic should be implemented as fully deterministic code, as a combination of code and AI, or as a full-fledged AI agent.

Turning signals into action. You observe the AI system at work and speak directly with its users. When its results aren’t good enough, you identify what is missing from the context, pipeline, tools, or architecture and solve it.

Integrating AI workflows into the product experience. You don’t just improve the metrics of headless agents - you make sure users love working with them.

Moving the needle. You ensure that your work meaningfully increases human productivity by reliably automating significant portions of their workload.

Shaping what comes next. Your observations and hands-on experience with moving the needle will directly influence product development and how the product evolves around an agentic paradigm.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Strong curiosity about accounting and fintech. To make a meaningful impact in vertical AI, you will need to learn the details of how accounting work is actually done.
• First-principles thinking and the judgment to determine how real work should be distributed among AI agents, AI workflows, and deterministic code.
• Strong software engineering or math/physics fundamentals validating analytical judgement
• Evidence of taking ambiguous problems from initial idea to measurable outcomes.
• High agency, clear communication, and comfort working directly with domain experts.
• Founder, founding engineer, or early-stage startup experience is especially valuable.

Experience in accounting, finance, or another regulated or document-heavy domain is a plus, not a requirement. No specific school or degree is required. Dropouts are welcomed!

WHY UNITED

• A founding team with a proven track record on both sides of the business: building AI products in this domain and leading large operations at a global scale.
• End-to-end product and technical ownership, with direct access to the founders and users.
• The opportunity to shape the product, agent platform, engineering standards, and technical culture from the ground up.
• The freedom to experiment with AI-native approaches to engineering, with highly flexible token budgets.
• Meaningful equity alongside competitive cash compensation.
• A massive addressable market ($1T ) and a long-term mission that extends well beyond the current vertical.

LOCATION AND COMPENSATION

This is a full-time role in New York City, five days per week onsite. We work together in person because the fastest path to dependable accounting agents is tight iteration among engineers, founders, and accounting operators.

Base salary: $150,000–$210,000 per year, plus meaningful equity. The final offer will reflect the candidate's abilities, experience, scope, and production-agent track record.

United is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.