Core Engineer

Seed-Stage AI Infrastructure Lab • Brooklyn, New York

Location

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York (on-site, 5 days a week)

Compensation

$180k–$215k base + competitive equity · on-site 5 days in Brooklyn

About the company

Our client is a seed-stage AI research lab in New York, building open-source continual-learning infrastructure — the memory and identity layer that lets AI agents stay genuinely personalised to the individual person using them. They started life as something else entirely and pivoted within months, once it became clear that every team building on top of AI hits the same wall: they need rich, portable context about their users and have nowhere to get it. The team is about fifteen people, engineering-led, committed to open source, and backed by a well-known set of AI and developer-infrastructure investors.

The role

You would own the development of their open-source codebase, working directly with the co-founder who runs engineering. It is a flat, fast-moving team, and the expectation is that you can hold the whole system in your head — shipping features, keeping integrations alive, and treating the open-source community around the project as an extension of the team. A large part of the job is deciding what to build next: reading where the AI ecosystem is going and choosing which integrations are worth the time, without waiting for a roadmap to tell you.

What you'll do

Own core feature development on the open-source memory and identity layer for agentic systems
Build and maintain the integrations and plugins that connect it to agent harnesses and third-party tools
Coordinate with the open-source community — review PRs, answer issues, treat contributors as teammates
Make product calls autonomously: read the AI ecosystem and decide which integrations to prioritise
Take part in the on-call rotation and support the developers building on the platform

What we're looking for

These are hard requirements. Check each one that applies to you.

I have 3+ years as a software engineer focused on backend and distributed systems
I've designed and built high-throughput distributed systems that carried real production traffic
I write Python and TypeScript, and have built backends with FastAPI
I've worked at an early-stage startup — ideally as a founder or founding engineer
I'm comfortable engaging directly with developers as users, in public and in the open
I can be on-site five days a week in Brooklyn, New York, or will relocate to be
I need no visa sponsorship — this client hires US citizens and Green Card holders only

Please note: every item above is a hard requirement for this role. Applications that don't meet all of them will be rejected. We recommend applying only if you check every box.

Don't check every box? No worries — submit your info here and we'll keep you in mind for roles that could be a better fit.

Submit Your Info

Nice to have

You have built developer tools before, for an audience of engineers
Containerisation in production — Docker, Kubernetes or Nomad
You have built and shipped LLM-powered features, not only consumed an API
An active GitHub, a technical blog, or open-source contributions we can read

Tech stack

Python and TypeScript, FastAPI and Node.js, Docker and Kubernetes, SQL, distributed systems, LLMs and API design.

Compensation & logistics

$180k–$215k base + competitive equity
On-site five days a week in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — this is not a hybrid or remote role
No visa sponsorship of any kind: US citizens and Green Card holders only
1 hire planned, reporting directly to the co-founder who runs engineering
Full-time

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