Founding Engineer
New York
- Salary
- $160K - $300K
- Level
- Mid
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 3 October 2026.
About the role
About us
- At Applied Labs, we’re building the platform for reliable AI agents that automate complex work. We are primarily an in-person company based in New York City.
Why this could be a fit
- Trajectory: 10x growth in 4 months; strong momentum.
- Ownership: High autonomy; own systems end‑to‑end.
- Challenging problems: Design novel, reliable solutions for complex tasks.
- Team quality: Early team from Harvard, MIT, Gemini, Meta.
What you’ll do
- Own core agent systems from idea to production: orchestration, tool‑use, planning, memory, evals.
- Architect for reliability: design agent loops and guardrails that hold up under real‑world edge cases.
- Ship fast, learn faster: run experiments, measure outcomes, iterate weekly.
- Collaborate tightly with the founders in NYC to set product direction, quality bars, and engineering culture.
- Set the blueprint: your design decisions, documents, and code style become the standard for future hires.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have shipped production systems end‑to‑end and love owning outcomes.
- Care deeply about reliability, not just demos - tests, evals, and metrics matter to you.
- Are product‑minded: you ask “what does the user need?” and then build the simplest thing that works.
- Prefer in‑person collaboration and fast decision cycles.
- Want to help define the engineering culture at a company that’s scaling quickly.
Our tools
- We currently build with Python, Go, React, Clickhouse, K8s, Bazel, Postgres, GCP, Modal
- We hire for ability, not checklists.
Compensation & benefits
- Competitive salary + significant equity
- Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off
- Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
- Fancy lunches (think Nubiani), as well as snacks, coffee, or boba that always hits the spot
- Relocation support to NYC if needed.
Apply
- Send a short note and your LinkedIn/GitHub to careers@appliedlabs.com (or apply on our site).
The team: Engineering
This role is one of 3 open in Engineering.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
GitHub (2 of 3)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Design Engineer posted Feb 17
- AI Agent Product Manager posted Jun 18
From the team and dates on Applied Labs's own job board.
Salary context
83 other open postings titled Founding Engineer state a salary: median USD 150,000 to USD 250,000 a year.
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