Founding Engineer

New York City, New York

Software Engineering

Permanent

Our client, a growing AI startup within the financial services industry, is hiring a Founding Engineer to join their team in New York. The successful candidate will be responsible for building customer-facing products, developing robust data infrastructure, enhancing AI agents, and creating the tools that enable the organization to continuously expand and become a leader in the financial market.

Responsibilities

Design, develop and deploy frontend and customer-facing features, including real-time systems that respond to changing information.
Build data pipelines, tools and infrastructure that enable analysts to integrate new sources and expand sector coverage efficiently and reliably.
Enhance the tools, skills and infrastructure that improve the capability, reliability and autonomy of AI agents.
Contribute across the full technology stack, spanning data, backend, infrastructure and frontend development.
Take ownership of projects from inception through to production, including data validation, QA, instrumentation, deployment and ongoing maintenance.
Apply sound engineering judgment to determine when AI-driven reasoning is appropriate and when deterministic software provides the better solution.
Develop robust agent infrastructure with a focus on reliability, observability, durable execution and appropriate controls.

Skillset

Demonstrated experience designing, building and operating production-grade software.
Strong expertise in backend engineering, data infrastructure, applied AI or product development.
Hands-on experience using AI agents to solve real-world business and engineering problems.
Experience orchestrating coding agents and working effectively with multiple agentic systems.
Strong technical judgment when determining whether to leverage AI reasoning or deterministic software.
Ability to work across the technology stack and quickly adapt to new tools, technologies and infrastructure.
A strong sense of ownership, with the drive to take responsibility for outcomes from start to finish.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced, early-stage environment where priorities and challenges evolve rapidly.
Strong understanding of building reliable, observable and scalable production systems.
Experience in capital markets, financial research or investment technology is a bonus.