Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer AI Data Migration NYC (On-Site) $160K–$180K + up to 5% equity Most data migrations still run on spreadsheets, consultants, and months of manual work. This startup is replacing all of that with an AI-native platform. Schema mapping, field transformation, validation — handled by AI, checked by deterministic engines, approved by humans. They have a paying enterprise customer in production and are closing a $1.5M pre-seed round. The role You'll be the second engineer, working directly alongside the founder from day one. The first engineer owns the AI/ML layer. Your world is the data infrastructure — pipelines, transformation logic, validation — and making sure what they're building today doesn't break when they're at 1,000 enterprise customers. You'll join customer demos and speak to technical pieces in front of enterprise clients. No Jira tickets. No hand-holding. You take a brief conversation and ship. What they're looking for You've built ETL pipelines and data pipelines in production. Schema mapping — taking multiple sources and mapping into a single target — is work you've done before, not work you're curious about. This is the number one thing. You've seen how software is built at scale and can bring that rigour to an early-stage environment. You know what breaks at 10 users and what breaks at 10,000. You're high agency. You take a rough brief, decide, and own it completely without needing direction. You can hold a technical conversation in a customer room. Transformation logic, validation pipelines — you can walk an enterprise client through it confidently. Tech stack: TypeScript · React · Next.js · Python · LLMs What's on offer $160K–$180K base 3-5% equity Founding Engineer title with real architectural influence On-site · Union Square, NYC US work authorisation required. No sponsorship available.