Founding Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding engineer role at an AI-native fintech startup building an autonomous system that understands businesses, finds buyers, structures financing, and manages deals end-to-end. You will own the most critical technical challenges at any given time and help shape the institution from first principles alongside an exceptional early team. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Help select and shape the early technical team, setting standards for how the engineering organization operates. - Build intelligence that models businesses, reconciles contradictory evidence, and reasons about how decisions propagate through companies and markets. - Design and ship agents that coordinate months of complex financial work across hundreds of counterparties, preserving context, commitments, and dependencies as conditions evolve. - Own end-to-end architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for production AI systems. - Move from ambiguous, high-stakes problems to working, reliable products across backend systems, applied AI, and user-facing interfaces. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years of experience shipping production-grade systems and owning critical technical decisions. - Deep hands-on expertise in applied AI, particularly building intelligent agents for complex, multi-party workflows. - Full-stack AI engineering background spanning backend systems, AI components, and product interfaces. - Experience with retrieval, memory systems, and evaluation frameworks in data-intensive environments. - Track record building AI models for business-process automation, evidence reconciliation, or decision propagation. - Experience owning greenfield or first-principles architecture for complex AI systems. - Background in financial services, document intelligence, or other complex professional workflows is a strong plus. - Experience at AI/ML document-intelligence or fintech research-tooling companies is a plus. - Strong drive for ownership, craftsmanship, and measuring whether systems actually work in the real world. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary: $180,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Equity offered. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.