Founding AI Engineer​/Member of Technical Staff

Founding AI Engineer / Member of Technical Staff

Location: New York, NY, United States

Department: Information Technology
Type: Full Time

Job Title: Founding AI Engineer / Member of Technical Staff
Pay: $125000.00–$190000.00/yr + 0.20%-1.50% Equity
Schedule: Full time, Permanent Role
Relocation Assistance: Available

As a founding AI engineer, you will design and ship the machine learning systems that power a digital analyst for public safety, working directly with founders and investigators to transform digital evidence into searchable insight. You will own the core backend and AI architecture, building robust retrieval and RAG pipelines that process vast volumes of unstructured data including calls, reports, and transcripts.

This role requires a hands‑on approach to prototyping with LLMs, embeddings, and vector databases, followed by hardening those ideas into production‑ready systems that law enforcement agencies can trust for high‑stakes investigations. You should bring at least four years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals in Python and modern distributed systems. Success in this position demands a proven track record of shipping ML/AI systems to real users and the ability to design sophisticated data pipelines and evaluation frameworks.

You will collaborate closely with forward‑deployed engineers to translate field feedback into concrete ranking improvements and feature sets. Beyond core AI work, you will contribute across the full stack to ensure the entire platform remains monitored and maintainable. This is a high‑ownership opportunity to define technical best practices and influence product strategy at the ground floor of a mission‑driven startup.

• You’ll design and ship the ML systems that power Closure’s “digital analyst” for law enforcement—working closely with the founders, Forward‑Deployed Engineers, and investigators in the field.
• Own core AI and backend systems that ingest, process, and search across large volumes of evidence (calls, reports, documents, transcripts, and more).
• Design and implement retrieval / RAG pipelines for unstructured and structured data, making it fast and reliable for investigators to find what they need.
• Prototype with new models and tools (LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, observability stack), then harden the best ideas into production systems agencies can trust.
• Collaborate closely with Forward‑Deployed Engineers and users to turn real‑world feedback from detectives and prosecutors into concrete ML features and ranking improvements.
• Contribute across the stack when needed (APIs, internal tools, evaluation dashboards) to keep the overall AI surface area robust, monitored, and maintainable.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals (distributed systems, APIs, data modeling) in a modern stack (e.g., Python + Type Script/React or similar).
• Hands‑on experience building and shipping ML/AI systems used by real users, ideally involving LLMs or other deep‑learning models (not just research or PoCs).
• Experience with retrieval / RAG or similar architectures over unstructured text or multi‑modal data (documents, transcripts, logs), including designing data pipelines and evaluation approaches.
• Comfortable working end‑to‑end: from understanding investigator workflows and problem framing, to designing experiments, to deploying and monitoring models in production.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills; able to work directly with founders, Forward‑Deployed Engineers, and non‑technical stakeholders in a small, fast‑moving, mission‑driven team.

• Field‑Driven Engineer – Strong full‑stack engineer (Python + modern…