Founding Platform Engineer - Data Engineering
Founding platform engineer at a pre-seed AI startup building a monitoring/assurance platform that keeps AI customer conversations safe, compliant, and auditable. You own the multi-tenant SaaS backend, conversation data pipelines, and infrastructure (Python, AWS, distributed systems), working directly with the CTO from NYC or the SF Bay Area.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Staff/Principal-level experience owning critical production systems and setting technical direction
- Strong backend and distributed-systems expertise: high-volume data processing, event-driven architectures, API design, data modelling
- Hands-on infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability experience
- Early-stage or high-growth startup experience with ambiguity and broad ownership (essential)
- Strong production-grade Python skills
- Enough TypeScript and React experience to contribute to the product portal
- ML systems fluency: model evaluation, deployment, monitoring, accuracy, latency, inference costs
- Enterprise SaaS experience: multi-tenancy, tenant isolation, access controls, entitlements
- Pragmatic use of AI coding agents (incl. Claude Code) while maintaining code quality, testing, and security
Nice to have
- Auditability, data provenance, or compliance-grade systems experience
- Speech/audio processing: ASR, diarisation, streaming transcription, real-time systems
- Contact-centre technology, CCaaS, quality assurance, or workforce optimisation
- GRC platforms or regulated enterprise environments
Full description
Founding Platform Engineer | AI, Distributed Systems & SaaS
AllUnited StatesUnited States - San FranciscoUnited States - New York City23 Oct
- New York City or San Francisco Bay Area
- Python | AWS | Distributed Systems | Multi-tenant SaaS
- Pre-seed AI startup | Founding engineering team
Build the platform that makes AI customer conversations accountable
Are you a Staff or Principal-level engineer who thrives on building complex systems from the ground up?
We're looking for a Founding Platform Engineer to help architect and build the core platform of an early-stage AI startup tackling one of the biggest emerging challenges in enterprise technology: ensuring AI-powered customer interactions are safe, compliant, reliable, and accountable.
As the first senior engineer, you'll work directly with the CTO, take ownership of the platform's architecture, and write production code while establishing the engineering foundations for future growth.
This is an opportunity to shape both the technology and the engineering culture of a company from its earliest stages.
The opportunity
Enterprises are deploying AI agents to handle customer conversations across voice, chat, email, and SMS. But as these systems take on increasingly sensitive interactions, businesses need more than capable AI — they need independent oversight, measurable quality and reliable evidence that their AI systems meet the standards required of them.
The company is building an AI monitoring and assurance platform that evaluates customer interactions against applicable regulations and business requirements, helping enterprises identify issues early, reduce risk, and demonstrate accountability.
You'll help build the infrastructure that makes this possible, from high-volume conversation processing to enterprise-grade auditability and security.
What you'll own
Core platform architecture
- Design and build the backend systems that power a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform.
- Establish robust APIs, data models, and distributed processing architecture.
- Make key technical decisions that will shape the platform as the company grows.
Conversation pipelines and integrations
- Build pipelines that transform raw conversations into structured, enriched, and scorable data.
- Develop integrations with contact-centre platforms, ticketing systems and direct-upload workflows.
- Help evolve the voice-processing architecture, including transcription and audio ingestion.