Founding AI Engineer

This range is provided by HartleyCo. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$120,000.00/yr - $180,000.00/yr

Direct message the job poster from HartleyCo

Headhunter | Founding Engineering Hires | Partner to YC & Tier 1 VC Portfolio | Facilitating Growth

Type: Full-time

Compensation: $120K to $180K base + 0.20% to 1.00% equity

Experience: Open to new grads

We’re working with one of the most exciting early-stage startups in AI safety and evaluation to help them hire a Founding Engineer.

They're building the world’s first independent QA platform for conversational AI - with a strong focus on voice. They've already signed multiple Fortune 500 customers and hit $100K ARR in their first month. Backed by elite investors, the founding team comes from AWS and Microsoft, and they’re now looking for someone to help build and scale the core product.

What You’ll Do:

• Build the brains : Architect intelligent systems that simulate, analyze, and evaluate voice and multimodal AI agents.
• Scale for the real world : Design scalable infrastructure (Lambda, EC2, WebSockets, WebRTC) to support real-time conversation flows.
• Engineer trust : Create detection and analysis pipelines that evaluate agent safety, alignment, and failure modes.
• Own the stack : From prototyping to production, you'll lead key systems across backend, ML, and infra.
• Collaborate closely with the founders on product strategy and technical direction.

About You:

• You’ve shipped AI/ML systems in production - ideally in NLP, LLMs, or agent pipelines.
• You’re comfortable taking projects from zero to one and owning the entire lifecycle.
• You’re a creative problem-solver who thrives in ambiguous technical environments.
• You’re scrappy, entrepreneurial, and excited to build in a high-velocity startup.
• Bonus if you’ve worked on voice interfaces, WebRTC, or AI safety/alignment tooling.

Why Join

• Define the tech and culture of a venture solving one of AI’s hardest problems: trust.
• Work on hard, meaningful engineering challenges in conversational AI.
• Join a proven, high-caliber team that’s already closing enterprise deals.
• Competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity.
• Build systems that shape the future of how we test and trust AI agents.

If this sounds like your kind of challenge, reach out and let’s chat.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Information Technology

• Industries

  IT Services and IT Consulting

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