About this role
About the Role
This is a founding-team engineering role at a seed-stage govtech AI startup building tools that help law enforcement tackle evidence overload across serious criminal investigations. You will design and deploy production AI systems with direct, measurable impact on cold cases, homicides, and other high-stakes investigations. The team moves fast and expects high autonomy, ownership, and a genuine sense of mission.
What You'll Do
- Build resilient, secure distributed systems that power AI-driven evidence search and analysis.
- Deploy large language models, vision models, and other ML systems in production criminal justice settings.
- Design RAG pipelines and semantic search infrastructure for unstructured evidence data.
- Architect structured data systems including query planning and semantic reasoning layers.
- Work with and build agentic systems that reason, plan, and take autonomous actions across investigative data.
- Stay current with emerging AI models and infrastructure approaches in a rapidly evolving landscape.
- Take end-to-end ownership of problems, including the ones no one has thought to ask yet.
What We're Looking For
- 6 or more years of backend engineering experience with a strong track record deploying LLMs, VLMs, or other ML systems in production.
- Solid foundation in building distributed systems with security and resilience as first-class concerns.
- Hands-on experience designing RAG or similar pipelines for unstructured data.
- Experience building structured data systems, including query planning, semantic modeling, or structured reasoning.
- Proficiency across multiple programming languages, including Python, and comfort working across multiple infrastructure providers.
- Background that includes time at a well-regarded engineering organization plus experience at an early-stage startup.
- Bias toward action in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and genuine enthusiasm for public safety missions.
- Authorization to work in the United States (US citizenship or valid work visa); note that visa sponsorship is not available.
- Bonus: experience with agentic AI systems or reasoning frameworks such as ReAct.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary range: $135,000 to $215,000 USD annually , plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
Hybrid, based in San Francisco, CA . New York City is also a possible base location.