Founding Agentic AI Product Engineer

NegotiateAI • San Jose, CA

5d

About The Position

We are hiring a Founding AI Engineer (Agentic Systems + Product Flow Architect) to build the core intelligence and product flow behind NegotiateAI. This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering, product design, and systems architecture, responsible for implementing agentic AI capabilities while shaping the structure and user experience of the entire platform.
You will design and build the agents that clean data, classify parts and chemicals, benchmark across suppliers, communicate with vendors, automate purchasing, and deliver ROI to customers, while also creating a scalable, intuitive product experience that ties every module together.
This role is foundational. You will directly influence the core architecture, the AI strategy, the customer-facing workflows, and the long-term evolution of NegotiateAI.
We are building a revolutionary enterprise platform to enable procurement Superintelligence. Our mission is to transform procurement into a core strategic function, starting with manufacturing and industrial verticals. We streamline indirect spend, unify fragmented data, and eliminate manual tactical work through structured taxonomies and AI-driven agents, unlocking exceptional operational efficiency and millions in savings.
Created by an Apple supply chain leader and backed by Menlo Ventures, we use technologies like agentic AI, LLMs, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to solve the structural data problems that plague industrial procurement: dirty part numbers, inconsistent suppliers, fragmented systems, and lack of real-time visibility.
If you love building AI agents that do real work and designing products that feel cohesive, powerful, and deeply intuitive, this is the place.
This foundational teammate will be responsible for both building AI agents and architecting great product flows that make the entire platform feel seamless. You will create the intelligence layer that powers:
• taxonomy and data harmonization
• chemical and MRO part matching
• CAS and synonym reasoning
• supplier and SKU benchmarking
• AI-driven negotiations
• automated purchasing workflows
• inventory and operations insights
You will design the primitives, services, and agentic pipelines that enable NegotiateAI to deliver a truly AI-native procurement experience, not bolt-on features.
This is not a research role.
This is not a siloed engineering role.
This is AI engineering plus product architecture, owning both the intelligence and the flow.

Requirements

• 6-8 plus years experience in AI engineering, ML systems, or technical product roles
• Demonstrated ability to build agentic workflows or multi-step AI systems
• Great design & product judgment, ownership of major product lines in earlier companies
• Can build at 10x speed using tools like Cursor and ship high-quality features extremely quickly
• 0 to 1 startup experience (Seed to Series B) shipping real product fast
• Ability to write production-grade code (Node, Python, TypeScript) and build quickly
• Strong product instinct with the ability to design clean, scalable user flows
• Ability to architect systems: data models, pipelines, services, agent frameworks
• Experience integrating LLMs, RAG, embeddings, and semantic search
• Bias toward action and rapid iteration
• Desire to build a B plus enterprise AI company and own a meaningful piece of it
• A plus player with exceptional technical and execution ability and strong ownership mentality

Nice To Haves

• Early large-company experience (Apple, Google, Palantir, Databricks, Ramp, Scale AI, etc.)
• Former Founder, founding engineer or very early tech lead hire
• Experience building consumer-grade UX or high-polish enterprise interfaces
• Experience working with industrial or manufacturing data (not required)
• Familiarity with ERP systems, supply chain, chemicals, or procurement
• Experience designing or implementing observability, evals, or reinforcement loops for AI agents

Responsibilities

• Build AI agents end to end, including multi-step workflows for: • taxonomy ingestion and cleanup • chemical and part classification and CAS lookup • entity resolution and attribute extraction • benchmarking across suppliers, SKUs, and regions • automated supplier outreach, negotiation preparation, and communication • purchasing automation and exception handling
• Architect modular agentic pipelines using LLMs, RAG, embeddings, and deterministic logic to ensure reliability and actionability.
• Define intuitive, powerful product flows that unify data cleaning, benchmarking, agent actions, and user decision-making into a coherent experience.
• Collaborate with the founder and engineering team to translate messy customer problems into crisp, scalable product patterns and reusable AI components.
• Design the intelligence layer and core data model, including taxonomies, schema, semantic relationships, and supplier or part hierarchies.
• Implement LLM and RAG pipelines for synonym resolution, unit of measure normalization, multi-language parsing, attribute extraction, and CAS-level matching.
• Build evaluation, monitoring, and guardrail systems to ensure agents are accurate, safe, auditable, and enterprise-ready.
• Ensure the platform complies with rigorous data handling requirements including anonymization, tokenization, SOC II principles, and GDPR alignment.
• Influence the long-term product direction, shaping the evolution into a broader industrial operations AI layer.

What This Job Offers

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