Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a three-person, Y Combinator–backed startup building an AI-native financial research platform for the healthcare sector. The product uses AI agents to continuously transform disparate public and private data sources into always-updated, source-backed industry models for professional investors — think banks, hedge funds, and asset managers.

You'll be the third member of a tight-knit technical team based in New York, owning infrastructure, tooling, and the systems that make AI agents reliable and capable at scale. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role with genuine influence over the product and technical direction from day one.

What You'll Do

• Work across the entire stack — shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.

• Build data pipelines and internal tooling that enable analysts to onboard new data sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.

• Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable in production.

• Own work end to end: inspect data, QA your builds, instrument them, ship them, and fix issues in production.

• Day one: integrate a new information source into the platform.

• Week one: ship a measurable improvement to the speed or reliability of the agentic systems.

• Within 30 days: build a company ontology and ship the first version of a key product feature.

What We're Looking For

Dealbreakers (must-haves):

• 2+ years building, shipping, and operating production systems end-to-end.

• Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI or LLM-based applications in production.

• Full-stack capability: backend systems, data pipelines, and frontend development.

• US citizenship required (no visa sponsorship available).

Required skills & experience:

• Python backend development with FastAPI or an equivalent web framework.

• Data infrastructure and pipeline development (ETL, data modeling, SQL).

• TypeScript and React frontend development.

• Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database.

• Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.

• AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment.

• Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates.

What sets you apart:

• Strong judgment about when agents should reason versus when deterministic software is the right call.

• Deep ownership mentality — you want responsibility for the whole result, not just your piece.

• Excitement about orchestrating coding agents in parallel.

• Comfort operating across unfamiliar infrastructure and scaling problems.

Nice to have:

• Capital markets, financial research, or investment banking domain experience.

• Experience with dbt, MotherDuck, Turbopuffer, or similar modern data tools.

• Cloudflare or edge computing infrastructure experience.

• Experience building tools and abstractions for AI/ML systems.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $156,000 – $182,000 USD annually

• Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding team role

• Full-time position

Location

• On-site in New York, NY — this is not a remote role.

• Visa sponsorship is not available; US citizenship is required.