Founding AI Engineer | Frontier LLM Systems | $500k+ & Equity | New York City Due to regulatory constraints this role is only open to US citizens. We’re hiring for a high-bar founding AI engineering team building mission-critical LLM, RAG & agentic systems for complex aerospace & defence operations. The bar (& current team) is high. Only the top 0.1% of AI Engineers can do this. If you’ve built real mission-critical LLM systems that can’t fail - this could be your next move. The Role You’ll own & scale a RAG-driven AI system powering critical aerospace operations. Expect to tackle retrieval quality, latency bottlenecks, & eval-driven fine-tuning head-on for the most innovative & exciting real-time systems in Aerospace today. This is full production ownership - from architecture to metrics. You should have experience with: • Deploying LLM-based systems at scale (Llama, Mistral, GPT-4, Claude) • Retrieval optimisation - hybrid search (BM25 + vector), reranking, caching • Evaluation - recall@k, precision@k, groundedness, hallucination metrics • Fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), RAG architecture, LangChain / LlamaIndex • Tooling: Hugging Face, Weaviate/Pinecone, FastAPI, PyTorch, Redis, Postgres • Monitoring inference, eval automation, & continuous improvement loops Bonus: • IoT or Hardware integration or real-time systems experience exp. Ideal background: • CS, ML, applied maths, EE or similar technical background • Proven 0-1 experience in a fast-moving AI, defence-tech, aerospace, infra or hard-tech environment • Strong software engineering instincts - not just model experimentation • Experience shipping reliable GenAI systems into real users or operational workflows • Comfortable working directly with founders, domain experts & technical customers You’ll be expected to: • Own the LLM pipeline end-to-end – retrieval → evaluation → fine-tuning • Improve accuracy, grounding, and eval metrics continuously • Make architecture decisions for scale, reliability & speed • Collaborate directly with founders & domain experts Stack: • Python • PyTorch • FastAPI • Postgres • Redis • Docker • Kubernetes • Weaviate or Pinecone • LangChain or LlamaIndex • AWS or GCP Offer: • Up to $500,000+ base salary + equity • Hybrid in NYC • Tight-knit, high-output team • High ownership, real impact, flat structure Interview Process: 1) Technical Deep Dive 2) Technical Assessment or Live Pairing 3) Panel focused on mindset & team fit Equal Opportunity We're hiring for an Equal Opportunity Employer. If you want to build AI systems that move beyond demos and into real-world, mission-critical use, then a conversation would be worth your time. TL;DR - Senior AI Engineer (NYC, On-site) • Build & scale production-grade GenAI systems from 0 to 1 • Own and improve RAG pipelines - accuracy and latency matter • Deep experience with LLMs, LangChain, Hugging Face & real deployments • Must have shipped working GenAI products, not just prototypes • Ideal: startup DNA, top-tier CS degree, fast execution mindset • $500K base + equity • All our new jobs are posted here 1st: linkedin.com/in/sufyanbashir/