Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite, 5–6 days per week)
Salary: $100,000–$200,000 + Meaningful Founding Equity
Employment: Full-time
The Opportunity
We’re partnering with an ambitious, early-stage AI startup in San Francisco that’s building intelligent AI agents to transform how organisations understand and act on complex government and regulatory information.
Backed by venture capital and operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, government and enterprise technology, our client is developing AI-powered products that turn vast amounts of unstructured information into actionable intelligence.
They’re now hiring three Founding AI Engineers to join their early technical team, working directly with the founders and playing a significant role in shaping the company’s technology, products and engineering direction.
This is an opportunity for engineers who want genuine ownership, technical freedom and the chance to build sophisticated AI products from the ground up.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Design, build and deploy production-grade LLM-powered applications and autonomous AI agents.
- Develop agentic workflows capable of processing complex documents, extracting insights and generating actionable outputs.
- Build retrieval systems, RAG pipelines and data infrastructure that handle large volumes of unstructured information.
- Design evaluation frameworks to measure agent accuracy, reliability and performance.
- Own the full development lifecycle from initial concept and prototyping through to production deployment.
- Build full-stack applications, internal tools, dashboards and user-facing product features.
- Collaborate closely with founders and non-technical stakeholders to translate complex requirements into working solutions.
- Influence architectural decisions, technical strategy and the company’s long-term product roadmap.
- What We’re Looking For
- 3–8 years of experience in software engineering, full-stack development, machine learning or applied AI.
- Strong technical pedigree, demonstrated through experience at a recognised high-calibre technology company or education at a Top 20 university.
- Proven experience building and shipping LLM-powered products or AI agents into production.
- Hands-on expertise with agentic AI workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLM evaluation.
- Advanced proficiency with modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to work across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines and frontend applications.
- Experience independently taking technically complex projects from concept through to delivery.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate closely with non-technical teams.
- Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco 5–6 days per week.
- Existing US work authorisation without the need for visa sponsorship.
- Nice to Have
- Previous experience as a founding engineer, technical co-founder or early employee at a venture-backed startup.
- Experience developing multi-agent systems, tool-calling workflows or complex AI orchestration frameworks.
- Familiarity with government data, regulatory technology, legal technology or other document-intensive industries.
- Experience working with messy, fragmented or constantly changing datasets.
- A track record of building independent technical projects or launching products from zero to one.
- Why Join?
- Founding-Level Ownership
- Join at a genuinely early stage with significant influence over technical architecture, product decisions and the direction of the business.
- Cutting-Edge Applied AI
- Work on sophisticated LLM agents, retrieval systems and evaluation frameworks that solve real-world problems rather than experimental AI demonstrations.
- Direct Access to Founders
- Work alongside the founding team in a collaborative environment where decisions happen quickly and engineers have real autonomy.
- Meaningful Equity
- Receive founding-level equity alongside a competitive salary with the opportunity to benefit from the company’s future growth.
- High-Impact Engineering
- Build products that customers depend on to interpret complex information and make important decisions.
- Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary of $100,000–$200,000, depending on experience.
- Meaningful founding-level equity.
- Benefits and paid time off.
- Significant career progression as the engineering team expands.
- Occasional travel opportunities.
- Interested?
- If you’re an ambitious AI engineer who has already shipped real LLM-powered products and wants to help shape a company from its earliest stages, we’d love to hear from you.
Richard Waterson – richard@oxbowtalent.com 203 896 4646