Founding Software Engineer
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Key details
- Salary
- $150K–$250K/yr
- Location
- New York City, NY, United States
- Work style
- Onsite
- Job type
- Full-time
- Function
- Software engineering
- Focus area
- other
- Posted
- 2w ago
Skills
About the role
About the company
Our client is a fast-growing consumer software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and delivery of application and backend features for a widely used consumer product, working side by side with company leadership. The work centers on applied AI systems and the infrastructure behind them, in a compact, in-person environment.
What you'll do
- Build and refine the core AI agent framework, covering tool use, memory, prompting, retrieval and evaluation.
- Take features from architecture through launch and ongoing iteration across the user-facing app and backend services.
- Partner directly with the founders to shape a simple, polished user experience.
- Extend agent capabilities with sandboxed tooling and backend and database infrastructure designed to scale.
- Help deploy and tune GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning and serving open-source language models.
- Weigh tradeoffs between speed, spend, stability, data protection and usability when making technical decisions.
- Contribute to future product initiatives as the company grows.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Solid engineering background across the full stack or on the backend.
- Hands-on experience building an agentic system that goes beyond simple LLM SDK calls, including tool calling, memory and system prompts.
- Practical experience with open-source language models, such as serving, fine-tuning or evaluation.
- A history of building and shipping your own product, whether a startup, side project or open-source work, with measurable results such as users, revenue or adoption.
- A public code portfolio showing personal projects and recent, steady activity.
- Clear, effective communication.
- Comfort taking ownership of whatever needs attention in a lean team.
- Willingness to work an intense early-stage schedule, up to 7 days a week with 5 in the office.
Bonus points
- Founding or early engineer experience at an applied AI or consumer startup.
- Strong consumer product instincts.
- Open-source contributions.
- A long coding history that predates AI coding tools.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 150,000 to 250,000 per year
- Equity
Location and work model
- New York, NY, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in the office
- Full-time