Founding Engineer ($150K–$250K + equity) Consumer AI with Real Scale

About the job

This role is being recruited by CoffeeSpace on behalf of an anonymous AI startup focused on building consumer AI applications with a strong environmental mission.

We’re identifying a small number of exceptional founding engineers from our network. If there’s a strong fit, we’ll introduce you directly to the founding team.

Location:
New York, NY

Compensation:
$150K-$250K base + 1%-3% equity

Employment type:
Full-time

About the company

This company develops consumer AI products that engage millions of users daily across the US, Europe, and Latin America. It is already profitable and plans to raise at a significant valuation soon. The company is committed to sustainability, running efficient open-source models in green data centers and planting a tree for every 100 prompts processed. The founding team includes experienced entrepreneurs with a track record of successful exits.

About the role

As a founding engineer, you will be instrumental in shaping the company's core technology. You will work closely with the founders to enhance the company's agent harness, which includes tool use, memory, system prompts, and retrieval. You will also contribute to the development of a consumer chat app with a large user base and help expand the agent capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Develop and improve the core agent harness, focusing on tool usage, memory, system prompts, and retrieval.
• Manage features from architecture through launch for a large-scale consumer chat app.
• Collaborate with founders to integrate chat, agents, and tools into a unified consumer AI experience.
• Scale backend and database infrastructure to support a growing user base.
• Optimize the deployment of incoming GPU resources for model fine-tuning and serving.

Why This Role Is Compelling

• You'll work on a product with real scale, engaging hundreds of thousands of daily active users.
• You’ll join a profitable company with plans for significant growth and a strong environmental mission.
• You’ll tackle challenging AI problems and have a direct impact on product development.
• You’ll be part of a small, dynamic team, with the opportunity to shape the engineering culture as it grows.

The Ideal Candidate

• 1-5 years of experience in full-stack or backend engineering, with a focus on applied AI.
• Proven track record of launching projects with tangible results.
• Experience with AI agents, agent harnesses, and scalable database infrastructure.
• Strong consumer product sense and familiarity with open-source work.

Next steps

1.
Apply via this LinkedIn job post

2.
We’ll review and reach out if there’s a strong match

3.
If aligned, we’ll introduce you directly to the team

If this role isn’t the right fit, we may suggest and make introductions to other high-signal startup roles we’re recruiting for, always with your permission.

A quick note on authenticity

This is a real, active role that CoffeeSpace is recruiting for in close partnership with the hiring team. We don’t post speculative roles and work directly with teams on their actual hiring needs.