Founding AI Engineer

Job description

### About the Role We're a small, product-focused team building an AI-powered B2B pricing platform that helps companies continuously optimize their pricing strategies — from packaging design and willingness-to-pay analysis to real-time deal guidance and discount governance. As our **Founding AI Engineer**, you'll own the evaluation systems, feedback loops, and LLM infrastructure that allow our pricing AI to earn trust and drive measurable revenue impact. This is a high-ownership, founding-team role. Your work directly ties model outputs to revenue and compliance constraints in high-stakes B2B pricing decisions. You'll be shipping to real customers from day one and expected to own outcomes end-to-end. ### What You'll Do - Build eval harnesses and benchmarks that use tracked pricing outcomes as ground truth. - Systematize and automate expert review workflows that are currently done manually. - Develop AI personas that simulate B2B buying committees and behavioral effects using usage data and call transcripts. - Automate persona training pipelines that are today manual. - Own LLM routing across providers (Anthropic, Google, etc.) with explicit cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs. - Maintain infrastructure and data residency boundaries (e.g., ensure EU model calls remain in the EU). - Extend the MCP server used by LLM agents — including customer-facing agents — so features are agent-driven. - Define "done" as when agents can drive features through MCP, not just when a UI renders them. - Work within a typed ontology of pricing entities so model outputs are structured and auditable. - Identify and remediate systemic latency, data drift, and cold-start issues in the pricing loop. ### What We're Looking For **Required** - 8+ years of engineering experience with strong, recent production LLM depth. - Proven track record shipping and owning LLM-powered product features in production — not just dashboards or research prototypes. - Direct hands-on experience building evals and observability for LLM systems. - Experience with MCP or building tools/integrations for LLM agents. - Familiarity with platforms such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Braintrust, or OpenRouter. - Experience operating under data residency, SOC 2, and GDPR constraints in domains where correctness is audited (pricing, billing, payments, or similar). - Strong communication skills — able to explain non-deterministic systems clearly to clients, partners, and pricing experts. - Product-engineer instincts: able to scope pragmatic solutions and deliver under ambiguity in a lean startup environment. - Authorized to work in the US. **Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.** **Nice to Have** - Experience building evaluation harnesses specifically for AI pricing recommendations using historical pricing outcomes as ground truth. - Background in SaaS pricing, revenue operations, or a high-stakes revenue-impact domain. ### Compensation & Benefits - **Base salary:** $225,000 – $255,000 USD annually - Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding-team role - High-impact, high-ownership position with direct influence over product and technical direction ### Location This role is **on-site in San Francisco, CA**. Candidates should be based in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.