Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: New York

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a Y Combinator-backed, AI-native financial research startup focused on the healthcare sector. You will be one of the first engineers on a three-person team, owning the infrastructure, tooling, and agentic systems that power a continuously updated model of entire industries for professional investors. What you build here directly shapes the product and the company.

What You'll Do

• Work across the full stack, shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.

• Build data pipelines and internal tooling that let analysts onboard new sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.

• Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable.

• Own work end to end: inspecting data, QAing builds, instrumenting, shipping, and fixing issues in production.

• In your first days, add a new information source and ship a measurable improvement to system speed or reliability.

• Within 30 days, build a company ontology and deliver the first version of a core product feature.

What We're Looking For

• At least 2 and no more than approximately 7 years of experience building, shipping, and operating production systems end to end.

• Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI or LLM-based applications in production.

• Full-stack capability: Python backend development with FastAPI or equivalent, TypeScript and React on the frontend.

• Data infrastructure and pipeline experience, including ETL, data modeling, and SQL.

• Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.

• Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.

• AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment experience.

• Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates.

• Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic logic should take over.

• Deep ownership mentality and comfort working in a fast-moving, ambiguous early-stage environment.

• Must be a US citizen or have a valid US work visa; no sponsorship available.

• Bonus: capital markets, equity research, or broader financial services domain experience.

• Bonus: familiarity with modern data tools such as dbt, columnar databases, or vector search, and edge computing infrastructure.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $156,000 to $182,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in New York City, New York, United States, five days per week. Candidates must already be local or willing to relocate.