Founding Engineer - Applied AI

About the job

Job Title: Founding Engineer - Applied AI

Salary: $150K-$250K base + meaningful equity

Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)

Visa sponsorship available for select cases

Relocation support available

Company Description

Venture-backed AI startup building the automation layer for hardware engineering.

Recent advances in foundation models have made it possible for AI systems to reason over increasingly complex technical information. This company is applying those breakthroughs to one of the most important and least-served areas of the economy: the design and development of physical products.

Their platform helps engineering teams retrieve, understand, and manipulate complex design information, enabling faster product development across global enterprises.

With early customer traction, ambitious technical goals, and a small team of exceptional builders, it's a rare opportunity to help define how AI integrates into real-world engineering workflows.

Job Description

Join a small, highly technical team building AI agents that power critical engineering workflows for enterprise customers.

This company sits at the intersection of large language models, information retrieval, engineering systems, and enterprise software. Their platform helps engineers navigate, interpret, and act on complex design data that traditionally required significant manual effort and domain expertise.

As a Founding Engineer in Applied AI, you'll design and build the core intelligence behind these systems, from retrieval and context management to agent workflows and post-training. You'll work directly with customers, rapidly prototype new ideas, and deploy production AI systems that solve real-world engineering problems.

This is a highly technical, high-ownership role with significant influence over both the product and the company's technical direction.

Why this role is remarkable

• Build AI systems that interact with real engineering workflows, not generic chatbot applications
• Work on difficult technical problems spanning retrieval, reasoning, context management, and agent design

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• Join as one of the earliest technical hires and help shape the engineering culture
• Own systems end-to-end from research and experimentation through production deployment
• Work directly with enterprise customers solving mission-critical product development challenges

What you will do

• Design and implement AI agent workflows for engineering applications
• Build retrieval, indexing, and context management systems that improve agent performance
• Develop models and workflows that interpret and manipulate complex engineering design data
• Experiment with post-training, evaluation, and optimization techniques
• Collaborate directly with customers to understand workflows and validate solutions
• Prototype rapidly, ship frequently, and iterate based on real-world feedback
• Influence architecture decisions and help define the company's technical roadmap

The ideal candidate

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production experience
• Deep familiarity with modern LLM architectures and agent systems
• Experience building production AI, ML, or backend infrastructure
• Strong Python skills and experience with modern ML tooling
• Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or information systems
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and owning large technical problems
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate directly with customers

Bonus points

• Experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, or similar ML tooling
• Experience building AI agents or retrieval-augmented systems
• Experience working with geometric, CAD, simulation, or engineering-related data
• Published research, open-source contributions, or notable technical projects
• Previous early-stage startup experience

Why candidates should join

• Massive opportunity: The future of engineering software will increasingly be AI-native, and this company is helping define what that looks like.
• Difficult technical challenges: Work on retrieval, reasoning, agent design, and AI infrastructure problems that sit well beyond standard application development.
• High ownership: Join as one of the earliest technical hires with meaningful influence over product direction, architecture, and company culture.
• Direct customer impact: Work closely with enterprise engineering teams and see your systems deployed in real production environments.
• Exceptional learning environment: Collaborate with a small team moving quickly at the frontier of applied AI.
• Strong compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity ownership, relocation support, and visa sponsorship for qualified candidates.

Next steps

1. Apply via this LinkedIn job post.
2. We will review applications and reach out if there is a strong fit.
3. If aligned, we will introduce qualified candidates directly to the hiring team.
4. If this role is not the right fit, we may also introduce exceptional candidates to other high-signal startup opportunities we are actively supporting, always with your permission.

A quick note on authenticity of opportunity

This is a real, active role that CoffeeSpace is supporting in close partnership with the startup's hiring team. We do not post speculative opportunities and work directly with founders and hiring teams on their actual hiring needs.