Founding Engineer (AI & Backend)
About The Position
Our client is an early-stage AI startup building the “taste layer” for artificial intelligence —technology designed to help AI systems understand subjective quality, aesthetics, and creative value across images, video, and design. Backed by leading investors and angels from top AI and design companies, the company is developing new infrastructure to evaluate and improve the quality of generative AI outputs. Their mission is to move beyond basic accuracy and help AI systems understand style, emotion, and creative excellence . With a small, high-caliber team that includes engineers and researchers from leading technology companies and AI labs, this startup is building foundational systems that combine AI research, data pipelines, and user-facing products. The team operates with strong ownership, rapid iteration, and a builder-first culture. This is an opportunity to join as an early founding engineer , helping define both the product and the underlying infrastructure that powers how AI systems evaluate and generate creative content.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in software engineering (flexible for exceptional candidates)
- Strong experience with Python and backend systems design
- Experience building AI or LLM-powered systems , including agent pipelines, embeddings, or retrieval workflows
- Experience with data pipelines, large-scale data processing, or web data collection
- Experience designing and implementing APIs and backend infrastructure
- Ability to build simple front-end tools when necessary (React / TypeScript)
- Comfortable working in early-stage startups with high ownership and ambiguity
- Experience building user-facing AI products or developer platforms
- Strong problem-solving skills and curiosity about creative AI systems
Nice To Haves
- Experience with RAG systems, vector databases, or index building
- Experience with web scraping, browser automation, or large-scale crawling systems
- Contributions to open source AI or developer tools
- Experience working at AI-native or high-growth startups
- Experience building consumer products, creative tools, or gamified user experiences
- Background in companies building search, indexing, or data platforms
- Personal projects demonstrating curiosity and experimentation with AI systems
Responsibilities
- Design and build AI agent systems, evaluation pipelines, and synthetic data generation frameworks
- Develop embedding, retrieval, and indexing systems that scale to large volumes of requests
- Build web crawling and scraping pipelines to gather and structure multimodal data
- Create data pipelines and processing systems to support model training and evaluation
- Implement APIs and inference services powering user-facing products
- Build internal tooling to support data operations, annotation workflows, and evaluation systems
- Develop product features including interactive tools, gamified experiences, and creative evaluation interfaces
- Help define the technical architecture and engineering culture of a fast-growing AI startup
Benefits
- Opportunity to join as a founding engineer in a fast-growing AI company
- Work alongside experienced engineers and researchers from leading AI and technology companies
- High ownership and influence over architecture, product direction, and technical decisions
- Visa sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates
- Collaborative, in-office environment in San Francisco
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
