Founding Backend Engineer, AI-Grounding

About the Role

Join an AI-grounding team as a founding backend engineer, building the infrastructure and systems that bring AI models into production. Your work will support secure, dependable AI applications for high-stakes public sector and public safety use cases.

What You'll Do

• Design and deploy large language models, vision models, and other machine learning systems in production.
• Build resilient, secure distributed systems across multiple programming languages and cloud infrastructure providers.
• Architect retrieval-augmented generation pipelines for unstructured data, and extend them to structured data using query planning and semantic modeling.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI infrastructure, models, and techniques.
• Work autonomously to identify and solve technical challenges while moving quickly and maintaining strong security standards.

What We're Looking For

• Backend engineering experience deploying LLMs, vision-language models, or other machine learning systems in real-world settings.
• Strong Python skills, experience with multiple programming languages, and familiarity with cloud platforms and infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience designing RAG systems and unstructured data pipelines; experience with agentic systems is a plus.
• Curiosity about advances in AI, a bias toward action, and comfort working in a fast-paced environment.
• Interest in applying technology to public sector needs, government capability, and public safety.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $135,000 to $215,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Hybrid work arrangement, with the primary location in New York City, New York.