Founding Software Engineer

New York, New York

Development - Back End

Permanent

Our client, a rapidly growing AI startup in the hospitality sector, is hiring a Founding Software Engineer to join their team in New York. The successful candidate will be responsible for helping to shape the product roadmap, work closely with customers and lead feature development from early ideas through to launch.

Responsibilities

Build and launch end-to-end features across backend systems, AI agents and customer-facing React applications.
Develop the infrastructure supporting agent context, tool use, orchestration, persistent state and human approvals.
Create APIs, integrations and data pipelines linking point-of-sale, accounting, payroll and other operational platforms.
Convert invoices, recipes, supplier catalogues and stock records into accurate, structured data.
Evaluate agents against real customer workflows, diagnose failures and strengthen recovery and escalation processes.
Use production results to assess models and providers, improving accuracy, completion rates, response times and cost efficiency.
Collaborate with customers to understand day-to-day challenges and turn their feedback into practical product enhancements.
Help shape product priorities, system architecture and strategic decisions as an early member of the engineering team.

Skillset

Strong technical expertise in LLM and agentic applications, backend and data system and/or React product development.
Proficiency in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, with the flexibility to work across both.
Experience deploying production AI agents, including tool execution, context management, persistent state, failure recovery and evaluations.
Ability to assess different AI models and providers, understanding how their strengths and limitations influence architecture and performance.
Experience developing and operating cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, Azure or equivalent platforms.
Strong data engineering skills, including APIs, integrations, pipelines and databases that handle incomplete or inconsistent information.
A track record of building substantial software, with the ability to explain technical decisions, trade-offs and lessons learned.
Good engineering discipline, including readable code, version control, testing and systematic debugging.
A product-focused, proactive approach, with the confidence to work with customers, challenge assumptions and own delivery in an early-stage environment.