Software & AI Engineer

Location: New York City (preferred) or San Francisco Bay Area, hybrid

Employer: Confidential

Employment Type: Full-time, founding role

Industry: AI for public safety and criminal justice

Salary Range: $165k - $200k+ USD base/year (based on experience and fit). Plus founding-level equity and a company performance bonus.

About the Company

Our client helps law enforcement search evidence and solve crime. Public servants across the U.S. use its platform to move faster on investigations into cold cases, homicides, gang conflicts, sexual assault and other serious offenses. The company is live with police departments and prosecutors across the country, cutting through the evidence overload that slows down the criminal justice system.

It is an intentionally tight-knit team of ambitious ex-Palantir and ex-IDF engineers and operators, working with high speed, high integrity and high autonomy, and backed by Y Combinator and other top-tier investors.

Our client is hiring a Member of Technical Staff to build the backend and AI systems at the core of its platform. You will bring the latest models into production in a setting where the results matter: the evidence behind real cases. You will have a direct say in the architecture, the AI approach and how the team builds as it grows.

This is a founding role, not a 9-to-5. It calls for proactivity and hard work, and it comes with the scope and ownership to match.

Responsibilities

Design, build and run resilient, secure distributed systems that handle sensitive evidence for law enforcement agencies.
Deploy LLMs, VLMs and other ML models into the workflows investigators and prosecutors rely on every day.
Build RAG and retrieval pipelines over unstructured evidence, and design for structured data too: query planning, semantic modeling and structured reasoning.
Keep up with new models and infrastructure approaches, and bring the right ones into the product quickly.
Be hands on deck when things break, and own the fix end to end.

Requirements

Strong backend engineering: you have built resilient, secure distributed systems in production.
Comfortable across programming languages (especially Python and TypeScript/React) and infrastructure providers.
Experience deploying LLMs, VLMs and/or other ML in real-world settings.
Have designed RAG or similar pipelines for unstructured data, and know how to build for structured data.
Based in New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area.
Able to complete an FBI background check and the CJIS clearance process. The company supports you through it.

Nice To Have

You have worked with, or are excited by, agentic experiences: systems that reason, plan and take actions across data.
Experience at an early-stage startup, with little structure and real ownership.
Interest in public safety, government or other mission-critical software.

Soft Skills

Mission-driven: excited to contribute to U.S. government competence and public safety.
Owner-builder mindset: a bias toward action, at home in an extremely fast-paced environment, and looking to do the best work of your life.
Comfort with ambiguity: you run toward the questions nobody has asked or answered yet.
Naturally curious: you keep up with the latest in AI because you want to, not because you have to.

Why This Role

Work that matters: the systems you build help investigators solve real cases, from cold cases to homicides.
AI in production, not in demos: LLMs and VLMs working on real evidence for real users.
Founding-level equity in a Y Combinator-backed company, with scope that grows as fast as the company does.
Full benefits: 3% 401(k) contribution regardless of your own, unlimited PTO, health and dental, short- and long-term disability, life insurance and a discounted gym membership.