/roles — ROLE_402
Founding Engineer
Pre-seed AI safety lab helping AI agents stay within the law, starting with financial services
The role
- COMP
- $185K - $250K
- EQUITY
- 0.25-3%
- LOCATION
- San Francisco
- WORKPLACE
- On-site
- EXPERIENCE
- 1 - 5 years
- VISA
- None, Visa transfers
- STACK
- Python, TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Grafana
- INDUSTRY
- AI, Law, Security, Financial Services
The company
An early-stage applied AI safety lab that tests where AI agents break the law, trains them to do better, and enforces legal compliance live, beginning with financial services.
- STAGE
- Series A-stage
- FUNDING
- $9M raised
- TEAM
- founding team of <10
- FOUNDED
- 2025
JD — the work
About the role
You would turn frontier research into production safety products, building training infrastructure, live guardrails, and legal evals from scratch. The company is a well-funded, early-stage applied research lab in San Francisco, a small group of engineers, lawyers, and researchers working with design partners in financial services. As a founding engineer you would also help shape the technical strategy and engineering culture.
What you'll do
- Create RL environments that test where AI systems break legal rules, beginning in financial services
- Harden the current research prototype into guardrails that run live in customer deployments
- Deliver safety tools to early partner companies and refine them around their feedback
- Help define architecture, technical direction, and team culture from the very start
- Cover whatever is needed in a research-driven setting where plans change fast
What they're looking for
- 3+ years as a software engineer shipping products built on AI or LLMs
- Zero-to-one experience launching significant features or whole products for customers
- A startup mindset: self-directed, proactive, and steady when direction changes
- Strong computer science foundation, through a degree or equivalent industry experience
- Availability to work on-site in San Francisco every weekday