Core Architect & Integration Lead — Applied AI

zerohash • New York, NY

9d

About The Position

The Core Architect & Integration Lead will serve as the engineering backbone of zerohash’s Applied AI team, supporting both its internal Intelligence Core—a system connectivity and control layer—and external agentic-commerce products. The role builds the access layer, audit logging, skills and agents, and system architecture above the platform accounts, event hooks, and retrieval layers maintained by Engineering. Its core objective is to connect company systems securely and create records of agent actions that third parties can verify.

The internal Intelligence Core will act as a sandbox for agentic-commerce products, validating identity, authority, write permissions, and tamper-evident logging before they are used in multi-institutional agentic networks. This is a foundational role on a new team, with wide scope and few hand-holds.

Requirements

• Senior, Python-first backend engineering experience.
• Production experience with event-driven systems, API integration, and CI/CD.
• Experience composing LLM agents (such as Claude, GPT, or comparable models, and Bedrock or comparable platforms) into standing systems, with judgment to keep models at the edges and the control plane deterministic.
• Security-first habits in a regulated environment such as an MSB/VASP, bank, or comparable organization, including treating least privilege and read-only access as default practices.
• Working familiarity with capability-based authorization, including attenuable tokens, workload identity, and policy as code.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with verifiable credentials, HTTP message signatures, or emerging agent-payment mandate schemes such as x402, AP2, MPP, Visa TAP, or Mastercard Agent Pay.
• Experience with self-hosted LLM stacks.
• Experience with confidential computing or trusted execution environments.
• A research habit and autonomy suited to a foundational role on a new team with wide scope and few hand-holds.

Responsibilities

• Own the access layer, including native connectors, MCP servers, and Databricks US/EU, using short-lived tokens, least-privilege read-only access, and no raw PII while enforcing data residency.
• Define a versioned schema for signed credential and action-record types in a shared namespace so records can be checked against one another.
• Establish build discipline, including deployment pipelines, authority policy as code, skill merge gates, and signed builds with SBOMs.
• Build an authority lease service with integrated kill switches.
• Capture events in append-only, hash-chained logs for tamper-evident, independently verifiable auditing.
• Migrate existing team agents onto the Core, launch new per-department agents, and lead security reviews for continuous read access.
• Extend the Core from read access to bounded write access, including logged actions, idempotency keys, compensating actions, and multi-approver time-locks for actions that move money.
• Design core primitives for cross-institution interoperability, wrapping actions in signed mandates, scoped authority, and attestation receipts compatible with standards such as x402, AP2, and MPP.
• Design self-hosted, zero-egress private stacks when required by classification evidence.
• Evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art developments in agent frameworks, confidential inference, and zero-knowledge attestations.
• Threat-model prompt injection, credential exfiltration, and confused-deputy risks upfront and maintain a security-first posture.

Benefits

• Healthcare insurance: zerohash covers roughly 100% of employee premiums and a portion of spouse/children premiums (U.S. only).
• Vision and dental insurance (U.S. only).
• Chance to earn equity.
• Maternity and paternity leave after 6 months.
• WeWork All Access Membership.
• Yearly work-from-home stipend.
• Yearly L&D stipend after 6 months.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed