Founding Backend Engineer, AI-Grounding

About the Role Join an AI-grounding team as a founding backend engineer, building the infrastructure and systems that bring AI models into production. Your work will support secure, dependable AI applications for high-stakes public sector and public safety use cases. What You'll Do Design and deploy large language models, vision models, and other machine learning systems in production. Build resilient, secure distributed systems across multiple programming languages and cloud infrastructure providers. Architect retrieval-augmented generation pipelines for unstructured data, and extend them to structured data using query planning and semantic modeling. Evaluate and integrate emerging AI infrastructure, models, and techniques. Work autonomously to identify and solve technical challenges while moving quickly and maintaining strong security standards. What We're Looking For Backend engineering experience deploying LLMs, vision-language models, or other machine learning systems in real-world settings. Strong Python skills, experience with multiple programming languages, and familiarity with cloud platforms and infrastructure. Hands-on experience designing RAG systems and unstructured data pipelines; experience with agentic systems is a plus. Curiosity about advances in AI, a bias toward action, and comfort working in a fast-paced environment. Interest in applying technology to public sector needs, government capability, and public safety. Compensation & Benefits Salary range: $135,000 to $215,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location Hybrid work arrangement, with the primary location in New York City, New York.