Founding AI Product Engineer

Company: Confidential - Venture-backed manufacturing AI startup
Location: New York, NY (in office 5 days per week; about 5 days a month of customer travel)
Compensation: $215,000 - $235,000 + 0.25% - 0.5% equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers (OPT, H-1B transfer); must be a U.S. person under ITAR

About the Company

A venture-backed AI platform rebuilding the front office of American manufacturing, automating order entry, quoting, purchasing and customer service for manufacturers of all sizes.

The Role

Our client is hiring a Founding AI Product Engineer (3-6 years) to own and productize the core backend platform. You will be one of four or five engineers building the agent runtime, extraction frameworks and integration infrastructure that power every customer, in a greenfield role where you decide what becomes part of the platform.

What You Will Do

• Own a core platform domain: agent runtime, extraction pipelines, ERP integration frameworks or evals.
• Unify overlapping order-entry tools, taking code reuse from about 20% to 80-85%.
• Pair with Forward Deployed Engineers on new customer needs and decide what goes into the platform.
• Help new customers go live in under a week.
• Travel about 5 days a month to customer plants to watch real users.

What You Bring

• 3-6 years of experience
• Production AI systems experience: multi-step agent pipelines, RAG, VLM extraction and evals running for real users
• Strong Python and architectural range across backend, data and AWS; full-stack a plus
• Proven end-to-end product ownership
• Bachelor's degree in CS or STEM; founder, CTO or founding engineer experience strongly preferred
• U.S. person status under ITAR (22 CFR 120.62), and based in or willing to relocate to New York

Tech Stack

Python, PostgreSQL, AWS (Bedrock, EC2, S3), Next.js, React, Google Vertex AI, Claude, GPT, RAG, VLM extraction, agentic pipelines, ERP and MES integrations