Founding AI Engineer: Mission-Critical LLM Systems; Hybrid
Listed on 2026-05-27
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Software Development
AI Engineer, Machine Learning/ ML Engineer, Software Engineer
Founding AI Engineer | LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | SF / Seattle / LA
Due to regulatory constraints this role is only open to US citizens.
Only a tiny % of AI engineers can build systems where failure actually matters.
A venture-backed frontier AI company is hiring a founding AI engineer to build production LLM systems for mission‑critical aerospace, defence & industrial operations.
The work is already in production, close to users, and held to a serious technical bar. You’ll own retrieval, evaluation, grounding, latency & reliability across LLM‑driven systems tied to real operational workflows.
You’ll own retrieval, evaluation, grounding, latency & reliability across LLM‑driven systems already tied to live operational workflows. The work sits close to technical users, domain experts & founders - so you’ll see the impact of what you ship.
What You’ll Do- Own and improve production‑grade RAG pipelines across hybrid search, reranking, embeddings & answer quality
- Optimise retrieval performance across precision, recall, latency, grounding & hallucination control
- Build scalable architecture for inference, caching, evaluation & monitoring
- Work on document intelligence, agentic workflows & technical decision systems
- Collaborate directly with founders, engineers & domain experts to ship fast without dropping the bar
- 5+ years building serious software, ML or AI systems
- Production experience with LLMs, RAG, retrieval, evals or agentic workflows
- Strong Python, backend & systems instincts
- Hands‑on experience with vector DBs, PyTorch, FastAPI, Lang Chain/Llama Index or similar
- A track record shipping real systems - not demos
- Startup, defence, aerospace, infra, fintech or hard‑tech background preferred
- High ownership, low ego, strong technical judgement
- Up to $500,000+ base + equity
- SF, Seattle or LA‑based engineers considered
- Regular NYC presence expected - relocation strongly preferred for the right person
- Small elite team
- Fast decisions, high standards, serious ownership
- Technical Deep Dive
- Assessment or Live Pairing
- Founder / Team Fit
Fast: 2 weeks total.
If you’re in the top 1% of AI engineers and want to build systems that matter outside a demo environment, apply now.
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