Founding AI Engineer | Prominent VC | Frontier LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | NYC

Founding AI Engineer | Frontier LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | New York City

Due to regulatory constraints this role is only open to US citizens.

We’re hiring for a high-bar top VC backed AI engineering team building mission-critical LLM, RAG & agentic systems for complex aerospace & defence operations.

The bar (& current team) is high. Only the top 0.1% of AI Engineers can do this. If you’ve built real mission-critical LLM systems that can’t fail - this could be your next move.

The Role

You’ll own & scale a RAG-driven AI system powering critical aerospace operations. Expect to tackle retrieval quality, latency bottlenecks, & eval-driven fine-tuning head-on for the most innovative & exciting real-time systems in Aerospace today. This is full production ownership - from architecture to metrics.

You should have experience with:

• Deploying LLM-based systems at scale (Llama, Mistral, GPT-4, Claude)
• Retrieval optimisation - hybrid search (BM25 + vector), reranking, caching
• Evaluation - recall@k, precision@k, groundedness, hallucination metrics
• Fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), RAG architecture, LangChain / LlamaIndex
• Tooling: Hugging Face, Weaviate/Pinecone, FastAPI, PyTorch, Redis, Postgres
• Monitoring inference, eval automation, & continuous improvement loops

Bonus:

• IoT or Hardware integration or real-time systems experience exp.

Ideal background:

• CS, ML, applied maths, EE or similar technical background
• Proven 0-1 experience in a fast-moving AI, defence-tech, aerospace, infra or hard-tech environment
• Strong software engineering instincts - not just model experimentation
• Experience shipping reliable GenAI systems into real users or operational workflows
• Comfortable working directly with founders, domain experts & technical customers

You’ll be expected to:

• Own the LLM pipeline end-to-end – retrieval → evaluation → fine-tuning
• Improve accuracy, grounding, and eval metrics continuously
• Make architecture decisions for scale, reliability & speed
• Collaborate directly with founders & domain experts

Stack:

• Python
• PyTorch
• FastAPI
• Postgres
• Redis
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Weaviate or Pinecone
• LangChain or LlamaIndex
• AWS or GCP

Offer:

• Up to $500,000+ base salary + equity
• Hybrid in NYC
• Tight-knit, high-output team
• High ownership, real impact, flat structure

Interview Process:

1) Technical Deep Dive

2) Technical Assessment or Live Pairing

3) Panel focused on mindset & team fit

Equal Opportunity

We're hiring for an Equal Opportunity Employer.

If you want to build AI systems that move beyond demos and into real-world, mission-critical use, then a conversation would be worth your time.

TL;DR - Senior AI Engineer (NYC, On-site)

• Build & scale production-grade GenAI systems from 0 to 1
• Own and improve RAG pipelines - accuracy and latency matter
• Deep experience with LLMs, LangChain, Hugging Face & real deployments
• Must have shipped working GenAI products, not just prototypes
• Ideal: startup DNA, top-tier CS degree, fast execution mindset
• $500K base + equity

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