Founding AI Engineer

SA Technologies • San Francisco, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

We are hiring an exceptional Founding AI Engineer / Member of Technical Staff to join an early-stage AI technology company building production-grade AI products from the ground up. This is a highly hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys working in a fast-moving startup environment, solving ambiguous technical problems, and taking complete ownership from architecture and prototyping through production deployment. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering fundamentals, backend/distributed systems expertise, and hands-on experience building production AI/LLM applications.

Requirements

• Strong professional software engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of production systems.
• Excellent programming skills in Python; experience with TypeScript, Go, Java, or C++ is beneficial.
• Strong backend engineering, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and system-design fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, agents, inference, or AI-powered applications.
• Experience taking complex products or systems from concept/prototype into production.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving abilities.
• Comfortable operating in an early-stage / startup / 0→1 environment.
• Strong Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, AI/ML, or related academic foundation.

Nice To Haves

• Previous founding engineer or early engineering-team experience.
• Experience at a high-growth technology or AI company.
• Experience with distributed systems and high-scale production infrastructure.
• LLM evaluation, retrieval, embeddings, knowledge graphs, agentic workflows, or model-serving experience.
• Demonstrated technical leadership without moving away from hands-on coding.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own core AI product and platform capabilities from 0→1.
• Develop production-grade applications using Python and modern backend technologies.
• Build and optimize LLM-powered applications, agents, RAG/retrieval systems, and AI workflows.
• Design scalable APIs, services, data pipelines, and distributed/backend systems.
• Integrate foundation models and AI services into reliable production applications.
• Build evaluation, monitoring, observability, and reliability mechanisms for AI systems.
• Rapidly prototype new ideas and convert successful prototypes into production systems.
• Work closely with founders and a small engineering team on architecture and product decisions.
• Own projects end-to-end with limited structure or supervision.
• Help establish engineering standards and technical direction as the organization scales.

Benefits

• Empowering Work Environment: A Great Place to Work, especially celebrated as one of the Best Places for Women.
• Excellence and Quality: A CMMI Level 5 Company, ensuring operational and service excellence.
• Globally Acclaimed: A Microsoft Gold Partner and Google Partner, with over 20 years of global IT consulting and Development solutions delivery.

What This Job Offers

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