Founding AI Engineer
Kinro (YC P26) · San Francisco, CA · 3 mo ago
On-siteEngineering$120k–$300k/yrFull-time
About the role
You will help define how Kinro builds software in the age of agents. This is a hands-on role for someone who has built AI products end-to-end, trusts agentic coding as a force multiplier, and can ship across product, backend, evals, and infrastructure with strong systems judgment.
Responsibilities
- Build AI product systems end-to-end, from tool use and backend services to evals and production monitoring.
- Use agentic coding tools aggressively and responsibly: break down large problems, set guardrails, and review generated work with high standards.
- Improve agent quality, latency, safety, and cost through better architectures, feedback loops, and evaluation harnesses.
- Work across the stack wherever leverage is highest, including product surfaces, infra primitives, and customer deployments.
- Turn one-off lessons from production into reusable product and platform capabilities.
Requirements
- You have built AI products, agent workflows, or LLM systems end-to-end in production.
- You know when to trust an agent, when to intervene, and how to structure work so the agent succeeds.
- You understand tool calling, latency, reliability, security, and cost tradeoffs in agentic systems.
- You can reason across the stack: application code, APIs, databases, cloud systems, and operational tooling.
- You have strong product taste and care whether something feels simple, fast, and reliable for the end user.
Nice to have
- Experience with evals, model routing, prompt injection defenses, sandboxing, or other AI systems safety work.
- Experience in high-ownership product environments where engineers talk directly to users and ship quickly.
- Experience in fintech, insurance, or other regulated environments.
Qualifications
- 3+ years of relevant experience.
- Strong understanding of machine learning and AI principles.
- Experience with Python, JavaScript, and related technologies.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience with data pipelines and ETL processes.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
Skills
- Agentic coding skills.
- Experience with AI safety and ethics.
- Experience with regulatory compliance in the insurance industry.
Benefits
We aim to move quickly and keep the process practical.
Pay
$120K - $300K
Schedule
Full-time