About the company
Our client is a fast-growing consumer software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and delivery of application and backend features for a widely used consumer product, working side by side with company leadership. The work centers on applied AI systems and the infrastructure behind them, in a compact, in-person environment.
What you'll do
- Build and refine the core AI agent framework, covering tool use, memory, prompting, retrieval and evaluation.
- Take features from architecture through launch and ongoing iteration across the user-facing app and backend services.
- Partner directly with the founders to shape a simple, polished user experience.
- Extend agent capabilities with sandboxed tooling and backend and database infrastructure designed to scale.
- Help deploy and tune GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning and serving open-source language models.
- Weigh tradeoffs between speed, spend, stability, data protection and usability when making technical decisions.
- Contribute to future product initiatives as the company grows.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Solid engineering background across the full stack or on the backend.
- Hands-on experience building an agentic system that goes beyond simple LLM SDK calls, including tool calling, memory and system prompts.
- Practical experience with open-source language models, such as serving, fine-tuning or evaluation.
- A history of building and shipping your own product, whether a startup, side project or open-source work, with measurable results such as users, revenue or adoption.
- A public code portfolio showing personal projects and recent, steady activity.
- Clear, effective communication.
- Comfort taking ownership of whatever needs attention in a lean team.
- Willingness to work an intense early-stage schedule, up to 7 days a week with 5 in the office.
Bonus points
- Founding or early engineer experience at an applied AI or consumer startup.
- Strong consumer product instincts.
- Open-source contributions.
- A long coding history that predates AI coding tools.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 150,000 to 250,000 per year
- Equity
Location and work model
- New York, NY, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in the office
- Full-time
Skills Required
- Solid software engineering background across the full stack or backend
- Hands-on experience building agentic systems beyond basic LLM SDK calls, including tool calling, memory, and system prompts
- Practical experience with open-source language models, including serving, fine-tuning, or evaluation
- History of building and shipping an independent product, startup, side project, or open-source work with measurable users, revenue, or adoption
- Public code portfolio showing personal projects and recent, steady activity
- Clear and effective communication
- Ability to take ownership in a lean team
- Willingness to work an intense early-stage schedule, up to seven days per week with five days in the office
- Founding or early engineering experience at an applied AI or consumer startup
- Strong consumer product instincts
- Open-source contributions
- Long coding history predating AI coding tools
What We Do
Raydar is a talent acquisition and business consulting firm that connects world-class and emerging talent with growing organizations. It supports companies through team development, strategic hiring, and customized growth solutions, helping clients recruit roles such as engineers, product managers, executives, legal counsel, and quantitative traders. Raydar focuses on understanding each organization’s needs, culture, and long-term goals to build high-impact teams.
