OPEN ROLE 01ENGINEERING
Founding Engineer, Platform & Applied AI
About Kintaro Labs
Kintaro Labs is an artificial intelligence company based in New York, building autonomous systems that plan, act, and improve on their own.
About the role
You will be our first full-time engineering hire, with two responsibilities. The first is the platform: the infrastructure our products run on, and its reliability, security and cost. The second is applied AI: how we build software with coding agents, and how AI features reach production safely. You will write code yourself in both. How much of this you lead from day one depends on what you bring.
What you will do
Platform
- Own the platform our products run on, including the service that creates, pauses, wakes and recovers an isolated compute environment for every user.
- Own reliability in production: monitoring, incident response, backups and restore drills. Share on-call with the founders.
- Lead architecture decisions: hosting provider, cost per user, and how the system scales to ten times the users.
- Harden the sandbox that runs user strategy code, and the limits on compute and AI spend.
Applied AI
- Design and run our AI engineering workflow: how coding agents are briefed, tested, reviewed and merged, and how we measure whether their output is correct.
- Build AI features in our products: agents that plan, use tools and coordinate with each other, with evaluation, cost and speed controls.
- Evaluate new models and tools as they are released and decide what we adopt.
Across both
- Write production code yourself on the hardest parts of our systems.
- Set and enforce engineering standards: code review, automated testing, releases, security and data handling.
- Help hire and mentor interns and later engineers.
About you
We do not hire on years of experience. You may be early in your career or well into it. What matters is what you have built, how you think and how you work.
- You have built something real and kept it running: a product, a service, a research system or a serious personal project. Scale matters less than having owned it.
- You take ownership. Given an unclear goal, you work out what is needed, get it done without being chased, and say plainly what you found.
- You want to commit to this company and help build it from the start.
- You solve problems from first principles and adapt quickly as the tools change.
- You are strong in at least one programming language and quick to pick up others. Our current stack uses Python, Go and TypeScript.
- You have built on top of large language models, such as an agent, a tool-using assistant or an evaluation system, and can explain how you tested it and where it failed.
- You use AI coding agents every day and have a clear view of where they can and cannot be trusted.
- You care about doing things properly: testing, review, security, and understanding why something works before you ship it.
- You can explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and turn incomplete requirements into small working iterations.
Useful exposure (optional)
Cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar), containers or microVMs, running untrusted code in sandboxes, databases and backups, model gateways and cost controls, evaluation frameworks, open-weight or local models, trading or market-data systems.
Compensation and location
Salary and equity, matched to what you bring. Full time, in person in New York City.
Show us what you have built
Your resume matters less than your work. Send it to careers@kintarolabs.ai along with:
- One thing you built that you are proud of (a link or a short write-up).
- A hard problem you solved and how you approached it.
- Your earliest availability.
Applying by email sends your details to Kintaro Labs, Inc. You do not need to include a photo, your date of birth or graduation dates. Please do not send ID documents, bank details or other sensitive records at this stage. Our privacy page explains how we handle personal data.
Equal opportunity
Kintaro Labs, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions on what you can do and how you work. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or creed, national origin, citizenship or immigration status, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, marital or partnership status, familial or caregiver status, military or veteran status, genetic information or predisposing genetic characteristics, credit history, unemployment status, height or weight, sexual and reproductive health decisions, status as a victim of domestic violence, stalking or sex offenses, or any other characteristic protected by federal, New York State or New York City law. We do not ask about your salary history. We consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in line with New York Correction Law Article 23-A and the New York City Fair Chance Act. If you need an accommodation at any stage of our process, email careers@kintarolabs.ai and we will work with you.