Founding Engineer
clera · 13 hours ago
About the Role
This is a founding engineering role at a Y Combinator-backed, AI-native financial research startup focused on the healthcare sector. You will be one of the first engineers on a three-person team, owning the infrastructure, tooling, and agentic systems that power a continuously updated model of entire industries for professional investors. What you build here directly shapes the product and the company.
What You'll Do
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Work across the full stack, shipping frontend features, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure.
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Build data pipelines and internal tooling that let analysts onboard new sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.
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Improve agentic parsing and extraction systems, making AI agents more capable and reliable.
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Own work end to end: inspecting data, QAing builds, instrumenting, shipping, and fixing issues in production.
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In your first days, add a new information source and ship a measurable improvement to system speed or reliability.
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Within 30 days, build a company ontology and deliver the first version of a core product feature.
What We're Looking For
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At least 2 and no more than approximately 7 years of experience building, shipping, and operating production systems end to end.
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Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI or LLM-based applications in production.
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Full-stack capability: Python backend development with FastAPI or equivalent, TypeScript and React on the frontend.
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Data infrastructure and pipeline experience, including ETL, data modeling, and SQL.
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Database design and optimization with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
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Production observability, monitoring, and debugging of distributed systems.
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AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment experience.
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Experience with real-time data systems and streaming updates.
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Strong judgment about when AI agents should reason versus when deterministic logic should take over.
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Deep ownership mentality and comfort working in a fast-moving, ambiguous early-stage environment.
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Must be a US citizen or have a valid US work visa; no sponsorship available.
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Bonus: capital markets, equity research, or broader financial services domain experience.
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Bonus: familiarity with modern data tools such as dbt, columnar databases, or vector search, and edge computing infrastructure.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $156,000 to $182,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York City, New York, United States, five days per week. Candidates must already be local or willing to relocate.