Founding AI Engineer / LLM / NLP
Chicago, Illinois
Hybrid
Direct Hire
$150k - $200k
A fast-growing Insurtech startup leveraging cutting-edge AI, NLP, and LLM technologies is looking for a highly hands-on Founding Engineer to join the team. Our mission is to revolutionize the insurance industry by streamlining workflows, enhancing risk assessment, and delivering smarter, faster, and more personalized experiences for policyholders.
As our Founding Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping our technology stack, driving architectural decisions, and building a scalable, AI-driven platform from the ground up. This role requires a true generalist—someone who thrives in a 100% hands-on environment and is comfortable working across frontend, backend, data engineering, and infrastructure. If you have a strong full-stack product engineering background and have built UI and backend applications used by external customers, this is an opportunity to make a significant impact.
Required Skills & Experience
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As our Founding Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping our technology stack, driving architectural decisions, and building a scalable, AI-driven platform from the ground up. This role requires a true generalist—someone who thrives in a 100% hands-on environment and is comfortable working across frontend, backend, data engineering, and infrastructure. If you have a strong full-stack product engineering background and have built UI and backend applications used by external customers, this is an opportunity to make a significant impact.
Required Skills & Experience
- 5+ years of experience in full-stack software engineering, preferably in AI-driven or data-intensive applications.
- Proven track record of building customer-facing applications—both UI and backend—from scratch.
- Strong frontend skills with modern frameworks (React, Vue, etc.) and backend expertise (Node.js, Python, Go, or similar).
- Deep understanding of AI/ML/NLP, including experience with LLMs (GPT, BERT, etc.) and AI model deployment.
- Experience designing data pipelines using Airflow, Spark, Kafka, or similar technologies.
- Expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
- Hands-on DevOps skills—building CI/CD pipelines, automating deployments, and managing infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
- Experience working in early-stage startups, wearing multiple hats, and making things happen.
- Exposure to vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Weaviate) for NLP applications.
- Experience with MLOps frameworks (MLflow, SageMaker, etc.).
- Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.
- 35%: Full-Stack Development – Building customer-facing applications, both frontend and backend, using React, Vue, Node.js, Python, Go, TypeScript, GraphQL, REST APIs.
- 20%: AI/ML Integration & Model Deployment – Implementing NLP/LLM-based models, optimizing inference with TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face, GPT, BERT, FAISS, Pinecone.
- 15%: Cloud & Infrastructure Management – Managing cloud environments, ensuring security and scalability using AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS), GCP, Azure.
- 10%: Data Engineering & Pipelines – Designing and optimizing ETL workflows and real-time processing with Airflow, Spark, Kafka, SQL, NoSQL (DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis).
- 10%: DevOps & Automation – Building CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code using Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins, GitHub Actions.
- 10%: Collaboration & Strategy – Working closely with founders, AI researchers, and product teams to align on roadmaps and technical decisions.
- Equity eligible
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- Unlimited Vacation Time
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