Founding Engineer
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.