Job Description
Company Overview
Join a high-intensity, YC-backed startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator. The company raised $2.5M in Seed Funding in December and is ranked among the top 10 companies in its batch in terms of revenue.
- Location: San Francisco-based HQ
- Team: Small, focused, mission-driven, ambitious, and execution-focused.
- Stage: Early-stage, rapidly scaling, actively working with enterprise clients.
Role: Founding AI Engineer
A rare opportunity to join an early-stage startup post-YC as a core technical member.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect, build, and scale intelligent LLM pipelines and agent-based AI systems.
- Own end-to-end ML workflows from experimentation to deployment.
- Collaborate closely with founders and CTO to shape AI/LLM architecture and product roadmap.
Top Priorities
- Raw: Must be exceptionally smart with a proven track record of high achievement (e.g., top-tier school, Olympiad/ICPC, published papers, high-impact projects, former founder, or founding engineer experience).
- Hands-on: Experience with building agentic AI pipelines or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) stacks. Not purely research-focused but capable of building production systems.
- Startup: High ownership, grit, and willingness to work in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment (~80+ hours/week).
- Culture: Comfortable working in an intense, no-nonsense environment. Good cultural fit with the team.
Technologies
- Python
- Strong experience with LLMs, agentic AI, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., OpenAI evals, custom evaluation frameworks).
- Basic infrastructure knowledge is a bonus.
Interview Process
- Initial: 30-45 mins with the Founder.
- Technical: 45 mins with the CTO.
- Final: In-person interview in San Francisco (travel covered) or a virtual 1-day work exercise.
About the Company: HartleyCo
Job Highlights
- Architect, build, and scale intelligent LLM pipelines and agent-based AI systems.
- Proven high achievement in relevant fields.
- Experience in building production AI systems.
- Work in high-pressure, startup environment.
- Strong Python skills.
- Experience with LLMs, agentic AI, and evaluation frameworks.
- Final interview can be in-person or virtual.
If you are ready for a challenge and want to make an impact from the ground up, we want to hear from you!