Founding AI Engineering Hire

About the company

Our client is a New York based consumer AI company, founded in 2025 and backed by $18M from tier one investors including a major strategic player in the consumer social space. They are building a new kind of connection product, one that uses AI and voice to replace endless feeds and swiping with curated introductions that actually resonate. The team is five people today, the product launches later this year, and the founder has already built and scaled a consumer product used by millions.

The role

This is the founding AI engineering hire. You will own the AI systems behind the core product experience, from conversational intelligence to the matchmaking insight that makes every introduction feel earned, and you will build the evaluation and model infrastructure that keeps it all reliable and improving.

What you'll do

• Design and maintain the prompts, structured outputs, and orchestration systems that power the product's AI features.

• Build evaluation infrastructure that measures AI quality at scale using tools such as Langfuse, TensorZero, and Promptfoo, and keep LLM judges aligned with human judgement.

• Run structured experiments across models, prompts, and configurations to optimize quality, cost, and latency.

• Own the model serving layer: deployment, inference infrastructure (API providers and self hosted), model versioning, and production cost and latency.

• Apply lightweight ML and ranking models where they beat prompt based approaches for match quality.

• Build internal dashboards, admin interfaces, and debugging workflows that give the team real visibility into model behavior.

• Design vector databases and memory architectures that power personalization and context aware experiences.

• Identify opportunities to fine tune open source models using SFT, DPO, or RLHF for cost and latency wins.

What we're looking for

• 5 to 8 years of engineering experience, with recent hands on work as an AI engineer.

• A track record building, shipping, and monitoring LLM powered applications in production.

• Experience building AI evaluation frameworks or model observability systems.

• Strong Python, plus FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and PostgreSQL.

• Early stage startup experience, or high ownership work on a small team inside a larger organization.

• A CS degree from a strong program, and a high slope career (fast promotions, strong companies, serious side projects).

Bonus points

• Hands on fine tuning experience with SFT, DPO, or RLHF.

• Recommendation or ranking systems background.

• Experience with voice AI systems.

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $200K to $300K.

• Competitive equity as a founding engineer.

• Visa: open to transfers (OPT, H1B transfers).

Location and work model

New York, NY. Onsite with the team in the NYC office.