Founding AI Engineer

Optimized deploys AI agents into the operations that run the physical economy: the factory floors, foundries, and procurement teams at Fortune 500 manufacturers and government organizations. Turning a capable model into a system that runs reliably in production is the hardest part, and we need a founding engineer to own it.

As a Founding AI Engineer, you'll architect the platform our agents run on: orchestration, tool and integration interfaces, inference and serving, observability, and the guardrails that keep agents safe in production. You'll own the agent development lifecycle from first pilot to scaled deployment.

Compensation range for this role is $150,000 - $220,000 + equity.

• Architect the agent platform:
  You'll design the orchestration, tool interfaces, and runtime that let our agents execute multi-step work reliably across complex supply chain systems.
• Own the development lifecycle:
  You'll have complete ownership from pilot through deployment, defining the standards and tooling that make agents fast to build and safe to ship.
• Make agents reliable:
  You'll build the guardrails, observability, and recovery logic that turn impressive demos into systems enterprises trust with mission-critical operations.
• Serve models in production:
  You'll own inference and serving across multiple providers, driving down latency and cost without sacrificing reliability.
• Set the engineering bar:
  You'll work directly with the founders to define our platform architecture and standards, and set the example for what world-class AI engineering looks like here.

• Have 4+ years building production software, including owning complex distributed systems end-to-end
• Have built or deployed LLM-powered agents, tool-use systems, or orchestration frameworks in production
• Are fluent in Python and Type Script in complex products
• Have strong instincts for reliability: testing, observability, and graceful failure in distributed systems
• Are willing to work hard, move fast, and grow quickly in a rapidly changing environment
• Are opinionated, curious, and energized by ambiguous, high-stakes problems