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 terminal focused on the healthcare sector. You will work directly alongside the founders, owning the infrastructure, tooling, and agentic systems that turn disparate data sources into a continuously updated, source-backed model of entire industries. This is a high-leverage, end-to-end role where your work will shape the product from day one.
What You'll Do
Work across the full stack, shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.
Build data pipelines and internal tools that allow analysts to add 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, QA-ing builds, instrumenting, shipping, and fixing issues in production.
In your first days, onboard a new information source; in your first weeks, ship a measurable improvement to agentic system speed or reliability.
Within 30 days, build a company ontology and ship the first version of a core product feature.
What We're Looking For
2 to 7 years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of 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 (FastAPI or equivalent), TypeScript, and React frontend.
Strong experience with data infrastructure and pipelines, including ETL, data modeling, and SQL.
Database design and optimization experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.
Familiarity with real-time data systems and streaming updates.
Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic software is the right tool.
Deep ownership mentality, with comfort operating in ambiguity on a small, fast-moving team.
Experience in capital markets, equity research, investment banking, or financial services is a strong plus.
Familiarity with modern data tools such as dbt, columnar databases, or vector search systems is a plus.
Must be a US citizen; visa sponsorship is not available.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $156,000 to $182,000 USD annually. Equity is expected given the founding-team nature of the role. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York City, five days per week. Candidates must already be local or willing to relocate.

Work arrangement
Yes