Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer New York City, NY | In-Person | $210,000–$250,000 Base + Equity About the Company Shields Group Search is partnering with a growing New York City-based technology company building a corporate access platform for investment banks. The platform supports CRM, email, event management, reporting, and AI-powered meeting allocation.

The company is investing in AI-powered capabilities designed to streamline workflows and enable large financial institutions to confidently automate meaningful work.

About the Role

We're seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join the team in New York City. This is an early, high-impact AI engineering position focused on building and shipping agentic product features that large banks will trust with real work. You'll take significant ownership of AI architecture, infrastructure, and production systems while helping establish the technical patterns and processes that will guide the AI team as it grows.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities, reporting directly to the Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer (CIO). The ideal candidate has built and deployed end-to-end AI systems and features in production, ideally with experience implementing evaluations.

Key Responsibilities

Build and ship agentic AI features: Develop production-ready agentic product capabilities that large banks can trust with real workflows.

Own architectural decisions

Make technical architecture decisions that balance performance, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Design AI infrastructure

Build the underlying agent infrastructure, including evaluations (evals), guardrails, tool integrations, and observability.

Develop backend systems

Build and maintain backend APIs using Python, Django, and/or FastAPI, along with AWS infrastructure, collaborating with product engineers on UI integration.

Establish engineering foundations

Define and implement technical patterns, processes, and best practices to support the AI team's future growth.

Evaluate emerging technologies

Research and assess new AI tools, frontier models, and techniques to continuously improve the product. Must-Have Qualifications Strong production backend engineering experience. Demonstrated experience building and shipping LLM-powered features into production.

Hands-on experience with frontier model prompting and prompt engineering. Experience designing and deploying production-ready agentic AI systems. Ideal Candidate Profile End-to-end AI ownership: Has independently built, deployed, and maintained AI systems and features in production, ideally incorporating evaluations.

Collaborative and mission-driven

Works effectively across teams, asks thoughtful questions, seeks to understand broader context, and prioritizes the collective mission.

Strong technical foundations

A background in traditional machine learning followed by a transition into modern AI engineering is welcome. Depth and quality of AI experience matter more than the total number of years spent working in the field.

Meaningful ownership

Has demonstrated outsized responsibility, technical impact, and ownership in previous roles.

Curious and adaptable

Interested in emerging AI technologies and comfortable evaluating new models, tools, and approaches to solve complex product challenges. Compensation & Logistics Base Salary: $210,000–$250,000 Equity: Included Location:

New York City, NY

Work Arrangement: In-person Position Type: Individual Contributor Reporting To: Co-Founder & CIO Visa Sponsorship: Sponsorship is generally not anticipated Why Join? This is an opportunity to join as an early AI engineer and directly influence how agentic AI is built and deployed within a platform serving major financial institutions.

You'll have substantial technical ownership, work closely with company leadership and product engineers, and help establish the infrastructure, architecture, and engineering practices that shape the company's AI capabilities as the team scales.

If you're an AI engineer who has successfully shipped production LLM and agentic systems, enjoys taking end-to-end ownership, and wants to build AI products that solve meaningful problems in financial services, we'd love to hear from you.