The Role

This is not a research role and not a “prompt-only” role. You’ll be building production-grade, AI-native product features end-to-end from intuitive frontend UX and robust backend systems to retrieval pipelines, agent orchestration, and evaluation.

You’ll collaborate closely with product, design, and fellow engineers to define and build the core of the systemzero platform, shaping both the architecture and the product experience as we scale.

If you enjoy operating at the intersection of product engineering and applied AI systems, and love turning cutting-edge AI into delightful user features, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, high-performance frontend and backend systems

• Own features end-to-end, from product discovery through production rollout

• Collaborate with product and design to create clear, intuitive user experiences for complex financial workflows

• Build and evolve AI-native capabilities, including:

  • Retrieval systems (RAG / GraphRAG)

  • Agent orchestration and tool integration / MCP

  • Context construction and grounding strategies

  • Prompting, iteration, and evaluation

• Design and implement secure authentication and authorization flows

• Build and maintain clean, well-designed REST APIs

• Work with relational data models and storage to ensure data quality and performance

• Ensure reliability and quality through testing (unit, integration) and observability

• Participate actively in code reviews, technical discussions, and architectural decisions

• Mentor and support other engineers, helping raise the bar across the team

What We’re Looking For

AI Systems Experience

• Experience building AI-powered product features used by real users

• Hands-on work with LLMs, embeddings, and graph/vector databases

• Experience with agent orchestration and tool integration / MCP

• Experience with RAG or GraphRAG systems

• Experience designing or working with agents, tools, and workflows

• Strong intuition for AI failure modes (hallucinations, grounding, latency, cost)

• Pragmatic approach to evaluation, iteration, and system design

Core Engineering Experience

• 6-10+ years of experience as a full-stack engineer building production systems

• Strong experience with TypeScript and React for modern frontend development

• Solid backend experience (e.g. NestJS or similar frameworks)

• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL and relational data modeling

• Experience designing and consuming well-structured REST APIs

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (ideally GCP)

• Comfortable with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions)

• Comfortable with Docker and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Pulumi)

Mindset & Way of Working

• High ownership, strong bias to action — you default to shipping, iterating, and fixing problems end-to-end

• Product-minded engineer — you care deeply about the user experience and business impact, not just technical elegance

• Comfortable with ambiguity — you thrive in early-stage environments without perfect requirements or heavy process

• Strong opinions, loosely held — you bring conviction, but are pragmatic and adaptable

• Scrappy and self-directed — you’re energized by building from zero to one and wearing multiple hats

• Clear, direct communicator — you collaborate effectively in small, senior teams

• Low ego, high fun — you’re humble, kind, and enjoy building with others

• In-person oriented — you value working together face-to-face several days a week

If you’re looking for a highly structured, process-heavy, corporate engineering environment, this role is probably not a good fit.

Nice to Have

• Previous experience as a founding engineer or early employee at a startup (especially in B2B SaaS), demonstrating ability to build from scratch and adapt quickly

• Prior exposure to financial systems or Office of the CFO domains (e.g. FP&A, accounting, business analytics).

What We Offer

• The opportunity to build a category-defining product for CFOs and finance teams, tackling important problems in a huge industry.

• Deep, hands-on exposure to applied AI systems in a real production environment (this is a chance to push the state-of-the-art in practice, not just in theory).

• A high-trust, senior team with strong technical taste and a collaborative, low-ego culture. You’ll be working with humble but world-class talent that values learning and growth.

• Real ownership and influence over architecture and product direction – your ideas will shape the product and company.

• Competitive compensation, startup equity, and benefits.

• A hybrid work setup with flexible remote scheduling and intentional in-person collaboration. (We have a coworking space and get together ~2-3 days a week to whiteboard, pair program, and have fun as a team.)