Location: Austin, TX Start Date: Q1 2026

Hybrid | Full time

Compensation: $200K - $250K

We are hiring on behalf of our client who is looking for an exceptional Applied AI Engineer to join their team in Austin. They are a well-funded ($40M) startup backed by top-tier investors like Paradigm and Electric Capital. They are currently rebuilding the infrastructure of the global financial system—bringing it fully on-chain to make it faster and safer. Your mission is to level up their entire organization’s impact by embedding AI deeply into how they engineer and operate. You will stay at the absolute frontier of AI development, ensuring their team evolves from "using AI" to "effectively managing a team of AI agents" with consistent quality and guardrails.

What You Will Do:

• Accelerate Engineering Velocity: Solve the gap between the frontier of AI research and the frontier of mission-critical production systems.
• Contribute Production Code: This is a hands-on engineering role. You will contribute directly to their core product to ensure your AI workflows actually work in a high-stakes production environment.
• Shape AI Product Features: Partner with product and engineering to ideate and prototype AI-powered features for their flagship financial platform.
• Systematize AI Usage: Create the orchestration layers, CI/CD integrations, and custom agent configurations that help the entire team work more effectively.
• Stay Ahead of the Curve: Act as the internal go-to expert for new models and tools, experimenting constantly and sharing learnings so adoption sticks across the team.

Who You Are:

• Strong Engineer First: You are a senior or mid-senior engineer who has shipped and owned meaningful systems in production. You have strong system-design instincts and a high bar for code quality.
• AI Obsessed: You code every day and spend your nights and weekends experimenting with the latest models and productivity tools.
• Solutions-Driven: You take pride in being the person who unblocks others. You are personable and thrive in a collaborative environment.
• Production-Grounded: You treat AI infrastructure as a production system. You are comfortable with custom agent configs, orchestration layers, and managing agents across remote environments.
• Curious & Gritty: You are gleefully curious about optimization and comfortable operating in the ambiguity of a fast-moving startup.

This role is NOT a fit if:

• You are looking for pure AI research or model training (they focus on applying models to workflows).
• You want to work fully remotely (they value in-person collaboration 3 days a week in Austin).
• You are primarily looking to lead a team of people; for the foreseeable future, you will be leading a team of AI agents.

Benefits

• Career-Defining Scope: Help define the "new normal" for how engineering teams build mission-critical systems.
• Advanced Tech Stack: "Nerd out" as part of your day-to-day job. Your core responsibility is to experiment with the coolest tech available.
• World-Class Team: Work alongside engineers and leaders from Goldman Sachs, Circle, Bloomberg, Kraken, and Ethereum.
• Comprehensive Package: * Competitive base salary ($200k-$250k) and meaningful equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision healthcare.
• 401(k) and generous PTO.
• A high-energy, mission-driven office environment in Austin.

Interview Process

1. Hiring Manager Interview (30 min): Chat with the CTO regarding your background and technical mental models.
2. Operations & Alignment (30 min): Interview with the Head of Operations focused on your working style and motivation.
3. Technical Deep Dive (TBD): A rigorous, hands-on assessment of your engineering and AI implementation skills.
4. Final Interview: A closing conversation with the President to discuss company vision and high-level fit.