Founding AI Product Engineer

We are looking for a Founding AI Product Engineer with 3–6 years of experience to own and productize the core backend platform at Arzana — a YC-backed AI company automating the front office of American manufacturing. You'll be one of four or five engineers who build the agent runtime, extraction frameworks, and integration infrastructure that powers all 22+ customers, not just one. This is a greenfield role with real ownership: you define what becomes part of the platform.

What will you be doing?

Build and own a core domain of the backend platform — agent runtime, extraction pipelines, ERP integration frameworks, or evals — with your work shipping to all customers Productize and unify existing solutions: take six overlapping order entry tools with 20% shared code and get that to 80–85% reuse Pair with Forward Deployed Engineers on customer requirements that have no framework yet, and decide what gets built into the platform Ship fast — new customers go live in under a week, and you're one of the people who makes that true Occasional travel (~5 days/month) to customer plants to watch real users interact with what you've built Key Requirements Production AI systems experience — multi-step agent pipelines, RAG, VLM extraction, evals running for real users Strong Python and real architectural range across backend, data, and cloud (AWS); full-stack capability a plus Proven end-to-end product ownership — you can point to shipped products and explain every decision CS or STEM degree (Bachelor's minimum); founder, co-founder, CTO, or founding engineer experience strongly preferred U.S. person as defined under 22 CFR 120.62 (ITAR compliance required); based in or willing to relocate to New York