Founding Software Engineer | AI Systems | $500k+ & Equity | NYC

About

Only a tiny % of engineers can build systems where failure actually matters.

A well-known venture-backed team in NYC is hiring a founding SWE to build software for mission-critical aerospace, defence & industrial operations.

You’ll be building the backend, data flows & infrastructure behind systems used in high-stakes environments - where latency, correctness, uptime & traceability matter every day.

This is for engineers who want the hard part - ambiguous systems, real ownership, high standards, and software that has to work.

Think real-time data, complex documents, decision workflows, APIs, distributed systems & production software that holds up under pressure.

Profile

You’re a software-first engineer with strong backend, systems or product engineering instincts. You’ve built services, APIs, data flows & infra that held up under real usage.

You understand runtime behaviour, bottlenecks, debugging, deployment & trade-offs. You can take messy requirements and turn them into software that works.

Stack

Python / TypeScript / Node.js / PostgreSQL / Redis / S3 / Docker / Kubernetes / AWS / LLM systems

Requirements

You should have:

• 5+ years building production software
• 0-1 experience in a startup, hard-tech, defence, aerospace, infra or high-performance engineering team
• Strong backend, platform, infra or product engineering depth
• Experience with APIs, data pipelines, distributed systems, observability & reliability
• Exposure to LLMs, RAG, agents, document processing or AI workflows
• A track record of shipping real systems - not prototypes

Responsibilities

You’ll own:

• Core backend systems for a mission-critical AI platform
• API design, data pipelines, architecture & infra decisions
• Services with clear interfaces, monitoring & fault tolerance
• Performance across latency, throughput, DB queries & cost
• Engineering standards from day one

Offer

• Up to $500,000+ base + equity
• NYC on-site / hybrid
• Founding-level ownership
• Direct access to founders
• High standards, fast decisions, no micromanagement

Process

• Technical deep dive
• Technical assessment or live pairing
• Final founder/team fit

If you’re in the top 1% of software engineers and want to build systems that matter in the real world, apply now or email sufy@opentalent.uk.