Founding AI Engineer | LLM Systems

About

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

You’re a Fit If You Have

• 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, LangChain/LlamaIndex 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

Stack

Python / PyTorch / FastAPI / Postgres / Redis / Docker / Kubernetes / Vector DBs / AWS or GCP

Offer

• Up to $500,000+ base + equity
• SF, Seattle or LA-based engineers considered
• Regular NYC presence expected - relocation strongly preferred for the right person
• Top-tier backing
• Small elite team
• Fast decisions, high standards, serious ownership

Process

• 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.

Our new AI-1st roles here first:

linkedin.com/in/sufyanbashir