- Raydar
- New York, NY
- Full-Time
- 16 days ago
- $150,000–$250,000 / year
Founding Software Engineer.
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Founding Software Engineer: our view in 3 lines...
- The Role:This role is for a software engineer building applied AI systems for a consumer software product.
- The Person:The person will build the AI agent framework, deliver app and backend features, develop sandboxed tools and scalable infrastructure, and deploy and tune GPU infrastructure.
- Requirements:The ideal candidate has full-stack or backend engineering experience, has built an agentic system, and has practical experience serving, fine-tuning, or evaluating open-source language models.
About the role
About the company
Our client is a fast-growing consumer software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and delivery of application and backend features for a widely used consumer product, working side by side with company leadership. The work centers on applied AI systems and the infrastructure behind them, in a compact, in-person environment.
What you'll do
- Build and refine the core AI agent framework, covering tool use, memory, prompting, retrieval and evaluation.
- Take features from architecture through launch and ongoing iteration across the user-facing app and backend services.
- Partner directly with the founders to shape a simple, polished user experience.
- Extend agent capabilities with sandboxed tooling and backend and database infrastructure designed to scale.
- Help deploy and tune GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning and serving open-source language models.
- Weigh tradeoffs between speed, spend, stability, data protection and usability when making technical decisions.
- Contribute to future product initiatives as the company grows.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Solid engineering background across the full stack or on the backend.
- Hands-on experience building an agentic system that goes beyond simple LLM SDK calls, including tool calling, memory and system prompts.
- Practical experience with open-source language models, such as serving, fine-tuning or evaluation.
- A history of building and shipping your own product, whether a startup, side project or open-source work, with measurable results such as users, revenue or adoption.
- A public code portfolio showing personal projects and recent, steady activity.
- Clear, effective communication.
- Comfort taking ownership of whatever needs attention in a lean team.
- Willingness to work an intense early-stage schedule, up to 7 days a week with 5 in the office.
Bonus points
- Founding or early engineer experience at an applied AI or consumer startup.
- Strong consumer product instincts.
- Open-source contributions.
- A long coding history that predates AI coding tools.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 150,000 to 250,000 per year
- Equity
Location and work model
- New York, NY, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in the office
- Full-time