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.