Founding Engineer, Applied AI Lead

Equi•New York, NY

About The Position

Equi is seeking a Founding Engineer and Head of Applied AI to serve as the lead builder across the entire company. This is a foundational leadership role where you'll design and build the software solutions that accelerate Equi's growth, working across the investment team, operations, and go-to-market. You will be the backbone of engineering at Equi, driving projects from ideation through execution across AI-powered systems, customer-facing applications, and internal tools. This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering and application development: you'll build RAG-based intelligence, automate complex investment workflows, and create new customer-facing applications on top of our data infrastructure. This is a rare opportunity for someone fascinated by sophisticated investment strategies who wants to build technology that powers a rapidly scaling platform. The role will evolve from hands-on building to eventually growing and leading the engineering team, while maintaining our vision of a small, flat organization where everyone stays close to the work.

Requirements

Experience: 5+ years of professional experience in software development, demonstrating progressive responsibility and impact
Passion for investing: Experience can’t substitute for an innate curiosity and passion for the world of investing. We operate in the depths of it, so you better love it!
Full-Stack Proficiency: Proven track record of designing, building, deploying, operating, and maintaining complex full-stack web applications in production environments. Strong proficiency in Typescript, Next.js, and Python
Data & Cloud Foundation: Solid understanding of data pipeline concepts (ETL/ELT) and data warehousing principles
AI-Driven Engineering: Competent in AI-driven engineering workflows and can use them to deliver effectively; experience building AI-powered applications
Product Acumen: Demonstrated ability to think critically about product strategy, understand user needs and pain points, and effectively translate them into technical solutions
Autonomy & Action Orientation: Proven ability to work independently with minimal supervision, navigate ambiguity effectively, and drive projects to completion with a strong sense of ownership and a bias for action
Collaboration & Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
Leadership Potential: Desire and ability to eventually grow and lead a small, high-performing engineering team

Nice To Haves

Prior experience working in fintech, investment technology, or financial services
Specific experience designing and scaling large-volume data pipelines or complex distributed systems on GCP
Experience using containerization technologies like Docker and API middleware like GraphQL
Familiarity with advanced data modeling techniques
Experience with RAG systems, LLM integration, or AI agent development

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary engineer and technical leader, building software solutions that accelerate growth across all teams
Partner directly with the Investment Team, Operations, and GTM to identify high-impact opportunities for technology and automation
Exercise significant autonomy, taking ownership of complex projects from conception through post-launch iteration
Make critical technical decisions and architect scalable solutions for a growing platform
Translate complex user needs and business requirements into well-architected, scalable, maintainable, and user-friendly full-stack applications (Typescript, Next.js, Python, Postgres on GCP)
Design, implement, and maintain performant and reliable APIs and backend services
Develop exceptional user experiences for clients and partners
Ingest multi-format investment data and parse it into both human- and computer-digestible formats
Use AI to perform investment analysis and provide recommendations to the human investment team
Build workflows to automate human actions across the investment process
Develop RAG-based intelligence systems to power internal and external applications
Act as the backbone of the engineering function, establishing technical direction and best practices
Lead technical decision-making and architectural design discussions
Proactively identify and advocate for process improvements and technology adoption
Eventually grow and lead the engineering team while maintaining hands-on building responsibilities