Founding Applied AI Engineer

New York, New York

Development - Back End

Permanent

Our client, a rapidly growing AI startup in the hospitality sector, is hiring a Founding Applied AI Engineer to join their team in New York. The successful candidate will play a key role in developing the platform, delivering AI applications into production and leading technical decisions, while also helping define the product roadmap and broader business strategy.

Responsibilities

Build and launch end-to-end product features, spanning backend services, AI workflows and customer-facing React applications.
Develop the systems that enable AI agents to operate effectively, including context handling, tool execution, orchestration, persistent state and human approvals.
Create APIs, integrations and data pipelines linking point-of-sale, accounting, payroll and other business systems.
Convert invoices, recipes, supplier catalogues and inventory records into accurate, structured data.
Design evaluations around real customer workflows and diagnose issues across model outputs and tool interactions.
Strengthen agent reliability through effective error recovery and escalation processes.
Use production results to guide model selection and improve accuracy, completion rates, response times and operating costs.
Engage with customers to understand their operational needs and translate feedback into practical product enhancements.
Help shape system architecture, product priorities and engineering practices as the business grows.

Skillset

Strong technical expertise in LLM and agentic applications, backend and data systems, or React product development.
Proficiency in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, with a willingness to develop across both.
Experience delivering production AI agents, including tool integration, context management, persistent state, error recovery and evaluations.
An understanding of different AI models and providers, and how their strengths and limitations influence architecture and performance.
Experience developing and operating cloud applications on AWS, GCP, Azure or similar platforms.
A track record of building substantial software and explaining the technical decisions behind it; startup work, personal projects and open-source contributions are welcome.
Experience building data pipelines and working with SQL or document databases to manage incomplete or inconsistent information.
Strong engineering practices, including version control, maintainable code, effective testing and systematic debugging.
A product-focused mindset, with the initiative to understand customer needs, challenge assumptions and take ownership of delivery.