Job description
A stealth, research-first AI startup is hiring a Founding Applied AI Engineer to join a small founding team building personal, proactive AI agents that watch how people work, learn their intent, and handle tasks on their behalf. Think self-driving for your daily workflow. The founding team comes from leading AI labs and research groups.
What you'll do
- Own and ship zero-to-one AI product areas end to end, from user-facing interfaces to agent workflows and model orchestration
- Build and iterate on agent harnesses and agentic systems that observe user behavior, learn intent, and automate workflows
- Make critical technical and product calls independently, including system design and shipping-speed tradeoffs
- Work directly with users and enterprise customers to understand their workflows and prototype fast
- Shape the product vision, technical architecture, and culture as a founding team member
Compensation
- $300,000 to $500,000 base, plus substantial early-stage equity
Location
On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Visa sponsorship available (new H-1B, TN), and transfers accepted (OPT, H-1B).
Requirements
- 2 to 6 years as an applied AI engineer
- Experience at an AI lab, applied AI startup, or infrastructure company
- Hands-on, production-level experience building agentic systems, agent harnesses, or model-based AI/ML products, shipped zero to one
- Deep professional Python
- Comfortable operating across product, engineering, models, and infrastructure, and able to define product vision
Nice to have: founder, early startup engineer, or major product owner experience.
Not a fit: pure computer vision, speech, or robotics backgrounds with no agentic systems work.