Senior AI Engineer

About the company

Our client is a venture studio that builds and launches its own AI companies rather than only investing in other people's. Validated concepts come out of the studio's research and strategy work, and small teams then turn them into real products with real users. Because the studio runs several ventures at once, the engineering work spans genuinely different problem domains, and the patterns learned building one venture are carried straight into the next. The team works out of offices in the Flatiron District in New York and in Chicago.

The role

This is a core builder seat inside the studio, turning validated venture concepts into shipped products. You would own an end-to-end agentic AI system from scope to production — agents, retrieval, orchestration and tool integrations — cutting ruthlessly to the smallest thing that proves value, then hardening it for real users. The role deliberately sits close to the commercial side: you would work directly with product strategists and design partners to shape what gets built, not only how it gets built. The studio is looking for someone with an entrepreneurial streak who has built things nobody asked them to build, and who thrives in ambiguity rather than waiting for it to resolve.

What you'll do

• Build end-to-end agentic AI systems — agents, retrieval, orchestration and tool integrations — for new ventures from zero to one through product-market fit
• Take a venture's first product from scope to ship: cut to the smallest thing that proves value, then harden it for production
• Extract reusable primitives and patterns from each build, so the next venture starts further ahead
• Work directly with product strategists and design partners to shape what gets built
• Operate across genuinely different venture contexts as need dictates, thriving in ambiguity
• Stay with what you ship after launch: real users, real failure modes and a post-launch story

Nice to have

• Experience at an AI-native startup, or as a founding or early engineer at a company that shipped product to real users
• A quant or quant-adjacent background alongside startup or entrepreneurial experience
• Experience building evaluation and regression harnesses for AI systems in production

Tech stack

Python throughout, with LLMs and agentic AI frameworks, RAG and retrieval systems, ML model serving, evaluation and regression suites, and CI/CD with observability and monitoring around it.

Compensation & logistics

• $190k–$250k base, depending on experience, with a bonus on top
• Additional upside through platform equity, studio fund participation and fund carry
• Full-time and hybrid, three days a week in office in the Flatiron District in New York or in Chicago
• Open to visa transfers (for example OPT or an H-1B transfer); the client will not file a new, first-time visa sponsorship