Founding Engineer (AI)

Location: On-site in Manhattan five days a week; unrestricted US work authorization required

Salary: $250,000–$500,000 base salary per year, plus up to 2% equity

Company

A profitable, self-funded business building a real-time pricing and decisioning platform for a fast-moving consumer marketplace.

What you will do

• Build and own the pricing engine, bidding infrastructure, and data systems powering the platform.
• Turn AI and model research into continuously running production systems.
• Build experimentation and A/B testing frameworks for pricing decisions.
• Improve the speed, throughput, and reliability of bidding systems.
• Create AI-powered tooling for production triage, failure analysis, and model-drift detection.
• Make early architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and work closely with the founders and commercial side of the business.

Requirements

• 3–10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated 0→1 experience taking an ambiguous product or technically difficult system into production.
• Experience designing, building, and operating data-intensive production systems.
• Strong Python skills or the ability to move quickly into a Python-heavy environment.
• Platform, infrastructure, or distributed-systems experience, with a strong data-driven approach to decision-making.
• Ability to work on-site in Manhattan five days a week and already hold unrestricted US work authorization; visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice to have

• Experience founding a company or joining an early-stage team that achieved commercial traction.
• Experience with pricing, trading, marketplaces, bidding, or optimization systems.
• Production AI, model evaluation, automated operations, or experimentation experience.
• Strong computer science background and interest in markets, pricing, or trading systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work directly with two founders in a small, profitable, self-funded business.
• Own major technical decisions without layers of approval or a polished roadmap.
• Remain hands-on while having significant influence over the engineering standard as the team grows.
• Receive up to 2% equity in addition to the base salary.

Hiring process

• 30-minute conversation with a founder, followed by a one-hour technical interview with the technical co-founder.
• Take-home exercise and presentation of the work to the team.
• Final on-site meeting; the process may move from first conversation to offer within two weeks.