Founding Engineer
Summary
First engineering hire at an AI startup building tools for commercial real estate. You'll build LLM-powered portfolio research, chat, and agentic workflow systems (Python, TypeScript, React, AWS) for institutional CRE owners, working closely with the CTO and customers — on-site in NYC.
About the Role
Join an AI company building tools for commercial real estate as its first dedicated engineering hire. Working closely with the CTO, you will build portfolio research and agentic workflow systems that help institutional owners manage complex operations and data.
What You'll Do
Build and own a portfolio research and chat interface for querying portfolio data, generating work products, and running multi-step analysis.
Design and ship agentic workflows, including structured extraction, tool-calling systems, and reliable multi-step AI pipelines.
Develop production infrastructure for LLMs, including evaluations, observability, context construction, structured outputs, failure handling, and monitoring.
Work with clients and domain experts to identify automation opportunities and deliver features from discovery through production.
Partner with the CTO to take ownership of a platform area and turn customer problems into effective technical solutions.
What We're Looking For
One to three years of experience as a software engineer, founding engineer, or founding AI engineer.
Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building and owning production software in a high-stakes B2B environment.
Experience building LLM agents, tool-calling systems, multi-step AI workflows, and reliable architectures that address nondeterminism and context management.
Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation and experience building B2B AI products or document-processing systems at scale.
Experience designing relational data models for complex, hierarchical data, including documents, versions, entities, and relationships.
Proficiency with TypeScript, React, Python, and AWS, and a four-year degree.
Ability to independently own platform features, communicate proactively, and work directly with customers and domain experts.
Must be based in New York City and authorized to work without visa sponsorship.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $165,000 to $185,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York, New York, five days per week.
Skills
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