Lead Applied AI Engineer

Lead Applied AI Engineer

$240,000–$300,000 base + equity

New York City (Hybrid)

About the Company

A seed-stage, venture-backed startup building an AI-native platform transforming a legacy, highly regulated financial services workflow. The company is tackling a critical, trillion-dollar decision-making process currently dominated by opaque, manual systems, bringing transparency, automation, and modern infrastructure to an industry overdue for disruption.

The Mission

This team is reimagining how institutional decisions are powered, leveraging cutting-edge AI to extract, structure, and interpret complex unstructured data at scale. By combining NLP, customizable policy engines, and robust data infrastructure, they are building a platform that delivers auditable, high-precision insights to sophisticated end users operating in regulated environments.

The Role

This is a true 0 to 1 opportunity. As the first engineering hire, you will lead the design and build of the entire platform from architecture to deployment, working directly with the founders. You will operate as both an individual contributor and technical leader, shaping the product, infrastructure, and future engineering team.

This role requires someone who has personally built and shipped applied AI systems from scratch, not just contributed to them. You will thrive in ambiguity, own critical technical decisions, and take a product from concept to market.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build the end-to-end platform architecture from the ground up
• Develop NLP and ML systems for large-scale document parsing, classification, and recommendation generation
• Build data ingestion pipelines for structured and unstructured financial datasets
• Create a flexible policy engine to support customizable logic and decision frameworks
• Design and implement APIs for internal systems and client-facing products
• Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and reliability
• Implement security, compliance, and auditability best practices
• Partner closely with founders to translate complex domain problems into scalable systems
• Hire and mentor future engineers as the team grows

What You’ll Bring

• Strong software engineering experience with backend and systems design expertise
• Proven experience building and shipping AI-driven products from 0 to 1
• Deep proficiency in Python
• Strong experience with NLP, transformer-based models, and classification systems
• Ability to operate independently and define technical direction in ambiguous environments
• Experience designing scalable APIs and distributed systems
• Cloud expertise (AWS preferred) and infrastructure automation experience
• Strong communication skills, comfortable engaging with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Tech Stack

• Python
• NLP and transformer models
• AWS (cloud infrastructure)
• Data pipelines and ingestion frameworks
• API design and backend systems

Why Join?

• True ownership, be the first engineer and shape the technical foundation
• High-impact problem space with real-world financial implications
• Work directly with experienced, high-caliber founders
• Build in a greenfield environment with no legacy constraints
• Competitive compensation plus meaningful equity upside
• Opportunity to scale into a leadership role as the team grows

About People In AI

People In AI is a specialist search firm focused on building world-class AI and engineering teams. We partner with high-growth startups and leading AI organizations to connect exceptional talent with impactful opportunities across applied AI, machine learning, and infrastructure.