Founding AI/ML Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY (in-person ~3 days/week) Type: Full-time Compensation: $125,000–$200,000 base + 0.3%–1% equity Experience: 3+ years (4–6+ preferred)
About Our Client
Our client is an early-stage, YC-backed company building technology that helps law enforcement search evidence and solve crime. Police and prosecutors across the U.S. use the platform to accelerate investigations into homicides, cold cases, and other major offenses by cutting through digital evidence overload.
The founding team includes engineers from Palantir and elite defense/intelligence backgrounds who have built national-scale systems before. Backed by Y Combinator, CRV, Hawktail, Liquid2, and Adverb, the company is growing fast, with live deployments and paying agency customers. The mission is straightforward: bring technical excellence to public safety.
The Role
As a founding engineer, you'll shape the company's AI backbone—processing massive video, audio, and text datasets to surface investigative leads. The work spans backend infrastructure and applied ML, and you'll ship end-to-end, from data flow design through production deployment in sensitive, secure environments. This is a zero-to-one role with deep ownership over models, data pipelines, and system design.
What You'll Do
- Build and scale retrieval pipelines over large multimodal datasets (video, audio, text)
- Integrate and deploy LLMs and VLMs into production investigative workflows
- Design and operate secure, distributed backend systems
- Own features end-to-end, from data flow design to production deployment
- Work across the stack—from infrastructure to model-level problems—in a fast-paced, high-impact environment
What We're Looking For
- 4–6+ years of software engineering experience, ideally 2+ in applied ML
- Strong Python backend skills plus ML ops familiarity (e.g., FastAPI, LangChain, PyTorch)
- Experience building secure, distributed backend systems (Python, Go, or TypeScript)
- A track record with real-time or high-throughput data systems
- Curiosity that spans both infrastructure and model-level work
- Comfort shipping production systems end-to-end (beyond research or academic settings)
- A solid grasp of data security and compliance considerations
- U.S. work authorization and willingness to undergo an FBI background check / CJIS clearance (no visa sponsorship available)
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary of $125K–$200K, depending on experience
- Meaningful founding-level equity (0.3%–1%)
- Full health and dental coverage
- 3% 401(k) contribution (regardless of employee match)
- Unlimited PTO
- Free lunches and dinners
- Gym reimbursement
- FBI/CJIS clearance sponsorship
Logistics
- In-person from NYC or SF at least 3x/week
- Approximately 25% travel
-
U.S. work authorization required; FBI background check / CJIS clearance process required
Interview Process
- Recruiter Screen
- Intro call with co-founder
- Coding screen
- Systems design (designing a system under specific constraints)
- Final behavioral interview
- Offer