Founding Engineer

About the Role This is a founding engineering role at a three-person, Y Combinator–backed startup building an AI-native financial research platform for the healthcare sector. The product uses AI agents to continuously transform disparate public and private data sources into always-updated, source-backed industry models for professional investors — think banks, hedge funds, and asset managers. You'll be the third member of a tight-knit technical team based in New York, owning infrastructure, tooling, and the systems that make AI agents reliable and capable at scale. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role with genuine influence over the product and technical direction from day one. What You'll Do Work across the entire stack — shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure. Build data pipelines and internal tooling that enable analysts to onboard new data sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably. Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable in production. Own work end to end: inspect data, QA your builds, instrument them, ship them, and fix issues in production. Day one: integrate a new information source into the platform. Week one: ship a measurable improvement to the speed or reliability of the agentic systems. Within 30 days: build a company ontology and ship the first version of a key product feature. What We're Looking For Dealbreakers (must-haves): 2+ years 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: backend systems, data pipelines, and frontend development. US citizenship required (no visa sponsorship available). Required skills & experience: Python backend development with FastAPI or an equivalent web framework. Data infrastructure and pipeline development (ETL, data modeling, SQL). TypeScript and React frontend development. Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database. Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems. AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment. Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates. What sets you apart: Strong judgment about when agents should reason versus when deterministic software is the right call. Deep ownership mentality — you want responsibility for the whole result, not just your piece. Excitement about orchestrating coding agents in parallel. Comfort operating across unfamiliar infrastructure and scaling problems. Nice to have: Capital markets, financial research, or investment banking domain experience. Experience with dbt, MotherDuck, Turbopuffer, or similar modern data tools. Cloudflare or edge computing infrastructure experience. Experience building tools and abstractions for AI/ML systems. Compensation & Benefits Salary: $156,000 – $182,000 USD annually Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding team role Full-time position Location On-site in New York, NY — this is not a remote role. Visa sponsorship is not available ; US citizenship is required.