Founding Engineer
Summary
First dedicated engineering hire at an early-stage AI startup building software for commercial real estate. Day to day: build portfolio research and chat products and ship production LLM systems — agents, tool calling, RAG, structured extraction, evals, and observability — mostly in Python, on-site in New York.
About the Role
Join an early-stage AI team building software for commercial real estate. As the first dedicated engineering hire, you will work closely with the CTO and domain experts to develop portfolio research and AI workflow systems used by institutional property owners.
What You'll Do
Build and own the portfolio research and chat experience, enabling clients to query portfolio data, create work products, and run multi-step analyses.
Design and ship reliable AI workflows for real estate operations, including structured extraction, tool calling, and multi-step pipelines.
Develop production systems for language models, 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 initial problem discovery through production.
Partner with the CTO to develop deep ownership of a platform area and independently turn client needs into effective solutions.
What We're Looking For
One to three years of experience as a software engineer, founding engineer, or founding AI engineer, plus a four-year degree.
Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building production software for high-stakes B2B environments.
Experience building LLM agents, tool-calling systems, multi-step AI workflows, and reliable agent architectures, including managing nondeterminism and context.
Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation and experience designing relational data models for complex, hierarchical information.
Background building B2B AI products, vertical software, or document processing systems at scale.
Ability to own platform features end to end and communicate proactively, including when working without detailed specifications or design support.
Experience with TypeScript, React, and AWS is relevant to the role.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $165,000 to $185,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York, New York. The role requires working in the office five days per week.
Skills
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