# Founding Software Engineer > Raydar · New York, United States · Full-time · Posted 2026-10-16 **Salary:** USD 150,000–250,000 **Workplace:** on_site ## Description About the company Our client is a fast-growing consumer software company. The role Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and delivery of application and backend features for a widely used consumer product, working side by side with company leadership. The work centers on applied AI systems and the infrastructure behind them, in a compact, in-person environment. What you'll do \- Build and refine the core AI agent framework, covering tool use, memory, prompting, retrieval and evaluation. \- Take features from architecture through launch and ongoing iteration across the user-facing app and backend services. \- Partner directly with the founders to shape a simple, polished user experience. \- Extend agent capabilities with sandboxed tooling and backend and database infrastructure designed to scale. \- Help deploy and tune GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning and serving open-source language models. \- Weigh tradeoffs between speed, spend, stability, data protection and usability when making technical decisions. \- Contribute to future product initiatives as the company grows. ## Requirements What we're looking for \- Solid engineering background across the full stack or on the backend. \- Hands-on experience building an agentic system that goes beyond simple LLM SDK calls, including tool calling, memory and system prompts. \- Practical experience with open-source language models, such as serving, fine-tuning or evaluation. \- A history of building and shipping your own product, whether a startup, side project or open-source work, with measurable results such as users, revenue or adoption. \- A public code portfolio showing personal projects and recent, steady activity. \- Clear, effective communication. \- Comfort taking ownership of whatever needs attention in a lean team. \- Willingness to work an intense early-stage schedule, up to 7 days a week with 5 in the office. Bonus points \- Founding or early engineer experience at an applied AI or consumer startup. \- Strong consumer product instincts. \- Open-source contributions. \- A long coding history that predates AI coding tools. ## Benefits Compensation and benefits \- Base salary: USD 150,000 to 250,000 per year \- Equity Location and work model \- New York, NY, United States \- On-site, 5 days per week in the office \- Full-time ## Apply [Apply at Raydar](https://apply.workable.com/raydar/j/7AC551769E/apply) --- Powered by [Workable](https://www.workable.com)