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.