Founding AI Engineer

Paratus•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Paratus is hiring a founding AI engineer to build its applied AI platform for military readiness and mission-critical work. The company turns fragmented data and organizational processes into executable knowledge that enables AI to run high-stakes workflows. Its platform is deployed with multiple Department of Defense customers, and the company is backed by the Air Force’s innovation arm, the Pentagon’s Chief Data and AI Office, and more than $2.5 million in pre-seed funding. Working side-by-side with the founders and directly with service members, the engineer will own the full lifecycle of Paratus’ AI systems—from understanding user needs and shaping product strategy to launching reliable agents used by service members. The role also contributes to defining how the company builds AI for high-stakes environments and helps shape its engineering culture and broader company decisions. The position is based in person at Paratus’ downtown San Francisco office, with travel to military bases approximately once a month to translate user needs into code.

Requirements

Prioritize driving impact for service members.
Have low ego, strong attention to detail, and willingness to learn.
Work in person at the downtown San Francisco office.
Travel to military bases approximately once per month.
Be a U.S. citizen.
Have experience building production AI agents that perform accurately at scale.
Have strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of owning systems end to end.
Have experience designing reliable AI workflows, including tool use, structured outputs, human-in-the-loop review, and evaluation.
Have experience with advanced retrieval techniques, including hybrid search, semantic search, and graph-based retrieval.
Have experience with TypeScript and full-stack web frameworks such as Next and Express.

Nice To Haves

Experience building evaluation datasets or frameworks to measure and improve AI-system performance.
Familiarity with knowledge graphs, embeddings, vector databases, and other methods for representing and retrieving information for AI agents.
Strong opinions and good judgment about model and agent behaviors, with awareness of emerging research and industry trends.
Comfort with ambiguity and rapidly changing product direction.
Experience in defense, government, healthcare, or another regulated or mission-critical domain.
Active U.S. security clearance.

Responsibilities

Own the full lifecycle of Paratus’ AI systems, from understanding user needs through product strategy and deployment.
Build and launch reliable AI agents used by service members.
Work directly with service members, including visiting military bases to translate operational needs into code.
Help define how Paratus builds AI for high-stakes environments.
Contribute to the company’s engineering culture and broader company decisions.