Founding Engineer

About the Role This is the first engineering hire at a seed-stage AI company building systems that help hardware engineering teams — in defense and medical device sectors — move at the speed of software. You'll partner directly with the CTO to own the full technical stack, set the engineering culture, and ship production AI workflows into live customer programs from day one. What You'll Do Design and build the system architecture that integrates AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tools while meeting the security requirements of defense and medical customers. Own end-to-end engineering execution: architecture decisions, production delivery, observability, evaluation suites, regression testing, and on-call operations. Ship your first production AI workflow into a live customer program — one that engineers use and depend on regularly. Build evaluation and training loops that improve the system from simulation runs, test data, engineer corrections, and field outcomes, including reinforcement learning grounded in real physics. Embed with engineers at partner companies, identify where the system fails against real deadlines, and translate those learnings into platform capabilities. Contribute to roadmap direction and execute on it reliably inside active engineering programs. Scale the platform across multiple partner companies with measurable cycle-time reduction, and mentor the small team you help grow. What We're Looking For 4+ years shipping software to production, including systems that real customers depended on daily. Proven track record putting AI in production: shipped LLM agent workflows that call real tools, handle failures gracefully, and are evaluated against rigorous test suites. Strong Python and backend or ML systems engineering skills for production AI systems. Experience designing evaluation frameworks and knowing when to reach for retrieval, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or plain software. Comfortable with observability, regression testing, and on-call ownership of production systems. Experience with CAD, CAE, EDA, or PLM tools is a strong plus. Background in frontier AI, applied AI, industrial software, simulation, robotics, or autonomous systems is a plus. Able to earn trust with both customers and domain experts — comfortable learning from experienced field engineers. Willing to travel to partner company sites; low ego, high standards. Compensation & Benefits Base salary $150,000–$220,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Location Full-time, on-site in New York City, NY .