Founding AI Engineer (Agentic AI)

# Founding AI Engineer (Agentic AI) **Job Type:** Remote / Full-time / B2B ## About Us AlpacaRelay is a Boston-based AI startup building the next generation of content creation products powered by artificial intelligence. We're tackling a massive market opportunity with an ambitious vision, a strong founding team, and a focus on rapid execution. Our team combines deep engineering expertise with real startup experience, moving quickly from ideas to products used by real customers. As one of our first engineers, you'll work directly with the founders, influence key technical decisions, and help shape both the product and the company from day one. If you're excited about ownership, innovation, and building something meaningful alongside a small team of exceptional people, we'd love to talk. ## Your Role As a Founding AI Engineer, you will work directly with the CEO to define and execute the technical roadmap. You will make critical architectural decisions, lead the development of our platform, and shape features from scratch. This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership. You will design, build, deploy, and optimize AI-powered products while helping establish the technical culture of the company. This is not just a job - it's a career-defining opportunity for someone who wants to build cutting-edge AI products, take ownership from day one, and grow into a world-class technical leader. You'll be working on text and image generation systems in an early-stage product with real users, where engineering decisions directly impact what ships. ## Responsibilities * Own the technical foundation of the company, from architecture to deployment. * Design, build, and deploy AI agents and LLM-powered workflows that solve real customer problems. * Develop production-grade AI applications using modern agentic AI frameworks. * Rapidly prototype new ideas and transform them into reliable product features. * Integrate LLMs, multimodal models, external tools, APIs, and data sources. * Build evaluation, monitoring, and observability systems for AI applications. * Collaborate closely with leadership to align technology with business objectives. * Mentor engineers and help establish engineering best practices. * Own the full lifecycle of AI products: prototyping, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. ## Preferred Qualifications * Strong software engineering background with Python. * Experience building production AI systems using modern agent frameworks. * Hands-on experience with tools such as LangGraph, LangSmith, LangFuse, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems. * Strong knowledge of NumPy, SciPy, machine learning fundamentals, and data processing. * Experience integrating LLMs, multimodal models, and external tools into real-world applications. * Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, and scaling. * Understanding of prompt engineering, RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability. * Experience with MCP servers, tool calling, and agent orchestration. * PhD or advanced degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, AI/ML, or a related field is a plus. ## Minimum Requirements * 2+ years of professional software engineering, AI engineering, or machine learning experience. * Proven experience building and shipping AI-powered products. * Strong Python development skills. * Experience working with modern LLM stacks and agentic AI architectures. * Ability to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate in fast-moving startup environments. * Strong ownership mentality and willingness to work across the entire stack. * Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. ## We Would Love to See * Open-source contributions. * Experience building AI products from concept to production. * Experience with multimodal AI systems (text, vision, speech). * Familiarity with MLOps practices and large-scale data workflows. * Startup experience, especially in seed or early-stage environments. * Interest in technical leadership and long-term company building. * Desire to grow into a senior technical leadership or C-level role.