Founding AI/ML Engineer

The Role

As a founding engineer, you'll shape the company's AI backbone—processing massive video, audio, and text datasets to surface investigative leads. The work spans backend infrastructure and applied ML, and you'll ship end-to-end, from data flow design through production deployment in sensitive, secure environments. This is a zero-to-one role with deep ownership over models, data pipelines, and system design.

What You'll Do

• Build and scale retrieval pipelines over large multimodal datasets (video, audio, text)
• Integrate and deploy LLMs and VLMs into production investigative workflows
• Design and operate secure, distributed backend systems
• Own features end-to-end, from data flow design to production deployment
• Work across the stack—from infrastructure to model-level problems—in a fast-paced, high-impact environment

What We're Looking For

• 4–6+ years of software engineering experience, ideally 2+ in applied ML
• Strong Python backend skills plus ML ops familiarity (e.g., FastAPI, LangChain, PyTorch)
• Experience building secure, distributed backend systems (Python, Go, or TypeScript)
• A track record with real-time or high-throughput data systems
• Curiosity that spans both infrastructure and model-level work
• Comfort shipping production systems end-to-end (beyond research or academic settings)
• A solid grasp of data security and compliance considerations

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary of $125K–$200K, depending on experience
• Meaningful founding-level equity (0.3%–1%)
• Full health and dental coverage
• 3% 401(k) contribution (regardless of employee match)
• Unlimited PTO
• Free lunches and dinners
• Gym reimbursement
• FBI/CJIS clearance sponsorship

Logistics

• In-person from NYC or SF at least 3x/week
• About 25% travel
• U.S. work authorization required; FBI background check / CJIS clearance process required

Interview Process

• Recruiter Screen
• Intro call with co-founder
• Coding screen
• Systems design (designing a system under specific constraints)
• Final behavioral interview
• Offer