Building specialized AI systems that actually understand how work gets done.

Founding Engineer

San FranciscoOn-site$170K - $250K2 - 5 years
A small, well-funded team launched this year is rethinking what it means to give every job its own AI. Not chatbots layered on top of existing tools—purpose-built agents that reason about domain-specific workflows, constraints, and edge cases most models miss. You'll design the core orchestration layer that coordinates multiple specialized models, handles ambiguous real-world inputs, and degrades gracefully when things go sideways. This means writing a lot of Python, sweating the details on evaluation pipelines, and occasionally throwing out assumptions when the data tells you something surprising.

What they're looking for

  • 2–5 years building production systems in Python, with a strong instinct for when to refactor and when to ship
  • Comfort working close to the metal of modern LLMs—prompting strategies, retrieval architectures, and evaluation methodologies are second nature
  • Experience designing fault-tolerant distributed systems or agentic workflows that handle messy, real-world data
  • Opinionated about developer experience and API design, with examples of interfaces you've built that other engineers enjoyed using
  • Excited by ambiguity and the pace of a seven-person team where your decisions shape the product from day one

Tech stack

Python

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This role is one we're recruiting for on behalf of a client company; the client's identity is kept confidential at this stage. A Fluency recruiter will follow up with details.