Founding Engineer

Our client is a pre-seed fintech company building an agentic neobank: an autonomous personal CFO designed to optimize cash, debt, budgeting, expenses, investing, and taxes. Founded in 2025 by a former senior financial-services leader at a global consulting firm, the company is starting with tools that help consumers get out of debt faster and is building toward an AI-native financial operating system. We are hiring a Founding Engineer to become the company's first technical hire and build the product from prototype through MVP launch. You will own the architecture, stack, and technical standards across web, mobile, backend, cloud infrastructure, AI agents, and regulated money movement. This is a deeply hands-on 0-to-1 role with a clear path to technical leadership as the team grows. What you'll do • Build the MVP end to end across web, mobile, backend, data, and infrastructure • Integrate banking-as-a-service partners, payment rails, card and lending systems, and KYC and AML services • Design secure, resilient architecture for an agentic financial-services platform • Build agentic workflows that make real-money decisions with deterministic logic, auditability, and compliance guardrails • Select cloud, data, observability, disaster-recovery, and security approaches from first principles • Set engineering standards for future hires while coordinating with contract engineers • Ship production systems quickly without compromising trust, reliability, or regulatory requirements • 5 or more years of full-stack software-engineering experience • A track record of building and shipping a product from zero to one for real users • End-to-end ability across React or React Native, TypeScript, backend services, Python, and cloud infrastructure • Hands-on experience building or deploying AI agents or agentic workflows in production • Experience owning architecture for secure, reliable production systems • Strong product judgment, bias for action, and comfort operating as the first technical hire • Ability to work regularly from New York City or San Francisco within 12 to 18 months Bonus points • Experience at a US fintech startup in neobanking, banking-as-a-service, cards, lending, or payments rails • Experience with KYC, AML, money movement, regulated data, or consumer financial products • Familiarity with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and production AI safety patterns • A computer-science or other technical degree • Interest in growing into a technical leadership and management role • Base salary of $150K-$300K • Founding-team equity of 1% to 4% • Exceptional scope and direct influence over product, architecture, and company direction • Visa transfers, OPT, and H-1B sponsorship may be available for exceptional candidates • Remote-first for the first 12 to 18 months • Transition to regular in-person or hybrid work in New York City or San Francisco after that period • Full-time founding-team position