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.