The role
- COMP
- $200K - $400K
- EQUITY
- 0.2-0.8%
- LOCATION
- San Francisco
- WORKPLACE
- On-site
- EXPERIENCE
- 2 - 4 years
- VISA
- None
- STACK
- Python, React, TypeScript, NodeJS
- INDUSTRY
- AI, Ecommerce, Marketplace
/roles — ROLE_411
Founding AI Engineer
Seed-stage AI-first commerce startup giving merchants an agent-driven alternative to traditional store platforms
The company
An early-stage commerce platform where an AI agent is the main way merchants run their store, with the usual merchant tools built in natively.
- STAGE
- Series A-stage
- FUNDING
- $7M raised
- TEAM
- ~10 people
- FOUNDED
- 2025
JD — the work
About the role
You would be responsible for all of the product's AI: the models, pipelines, and evaluations that tell the team whether a feature truly helps merchants. This is a production role, not research; your work reaches paying merchants and you become the person the team turns to when anything model-related breaks. Because you would be among the earliest engineers, the architecture choices you make early will stick for years.
What you'll do
- Build and own the AI stack, from retrieval and prompting to agent orchestration, tool calling, and selective fine-tuning
- Set up evaluations first, before building features, so no model change ships on gut feel
- Bring latency and cost down to levels that hold up at real merchant scale
- Diagnose whether an unclear product issue comes down to the model, the data, or the UX, then fix it
- Push changes out every week and study how they behave with real users
What they're looking for
- 2 to 4 years of engineering experience, including AI systems in production
- Hands-on work with LLM prompting, retrieval, agents, and evaluation
- Skills in Python plus TypeScript, React, and Node.js
- Sound judgment on architecture decisions with long-term consequences
- Willingness to work on-site in San Francisco