Founding Software Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Act as an early, senior-level product engineer who owns features from first concept through production. Build customer-facing applications and the backend services behind them, with a focus on AI-driven automation that can be trusted. Work directly with customers to gather requirements and help shape the roadmap.

What you'll do

- Build new functionality end to end, from the backend logic to the user interface people use every day.

- Own the underlying framework that lets AI-driven automation manage context, coordinate tasks, keep state and request human sign-off on important actions.

- Develop backend APIs, third-party integrations, background jobs and data pipelines that turn messy inputs into clean, reliable data.

- Make automated AI features dependable through evaluations based on real workflows, failure tracing, recovery and escalation paths, and model choices informed by production results.

- Build polished web interfaces with React alongside the backend services that power them.

- Speak with customers, gather requirements and, where needed, take ownership of customer-specific workflows.

- Learn from production usage and contribute to the roadmap and strategic decisions.

Requirements

What we're looking for

- 1 to 3 years of software engineering experience, with strength in product engineering using React and/or LLM-based applications.

- Solid fundamentals in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, and willingness to become productive in both.

- Hands-on experience launching autonomous AI features into production, including building and debugging the supporting framework.

- Experience working across multiple model providers.

- A substantial project you can discuss in depth, including architecture, trade-offs, limitations and what you would change.

- Close attention to messy details such as missing data, duplicates, unexpected inputs and confusing user experiences.

- Founder mindset with strong ownership, agency and comfort turning vague problems into finished work.

- Good product intuition and taste, with care for the reasons behind what gets built.

- Strong communication skills and comfort working directly with customers.

- Early-stage startup experience is strongly preferred.

Bonus points

- Familiarity with retrieval techniques, data modeling, and evaluation, tracing, cost and permissions practices.

- Experience as a founder or building something real.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 150,000 to 220,000 per year

- Equity

- Health, dental and medical coverage

Location and work model

- New York, NY, United States

- On-site

- Full-time