Founding Agentic Engineer

About Tonifo

Tonifo builds AI cost intelligence for finance teams. As organizations expand their spending on large language model providers each quarter, finance and accounting teams have no reliable way to map that spend to general ledger accounts, projects, products, or business units. Tonifo automates this mapping and produces audit-grade records that controllers, finance leaders, and external auditors can rely on with confidence.

We are an early-stage company working with design partners and preparing for our first production deployments. Pre-seed funding is closing, and we are building the founding team.

About the Role

We are hiring a Founding Agentic Engineer to own the technical foundation of Tonifo. You will lead the development of two core systems: a classification engine that maps AI provider spend to the general ledger, and an instrumentation engine that discovers and instruments large language model call sites within customer codebases. You will work closely with the founder and design partners to translate customer needs into a reliable, production-grade product.

As one of the first members of the team, you will shape Tonifo's engineering culture, architecture, and technical direction. This role offers meaningful equity, broad ownership, and the opportunity to build a product that finance teams will depend on every day.

A Day in the Life

• Design, build, and operate the classification engine, including data ingestion, model selection, evaluation infrastructure, and the feedback loop that incorporates customer corrections.
• Build and maintain production-grade data pipelines that synchronize usage and billing data from third-party AI provider APIs, with robust error handling, retry logic, rate limiting, and reconciliation.
• Lead the design and implementation of the instrumentation engine, including AST-based code analysis across Python and TypeScript and the security architecture for accessing customer codebases.
• Own core infrastructure, including database schema design, multi-tenant data isolation, observability, alerting, and deployment workflows on AWS.
• Partner with the founder and design partners to translate customer feedback into product and architectural decisions.
• Establish engineering practices, technical standards, and the foundation for the future team.

Must Have

• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience, including production ownership of non-trivial systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python, particularly in production backend environments such as FastAPI.
• Demonstrated experience designing, shipping, and operating machine learning systems in production. Examples include classification, recommendation, ranking, or retrieval systems that handled real-world data and supported feedback loops over time.
• Proven experience building reliable data pipelines that integrate with external APIs, handle failures gracefully, reconcile data, and maintain audit trails.
• Working knowledge of AWS services such as RDS, Cognito, Secrets Manager, and EC2, with the ability to operate independently in a cloud environment.
• Experience with multi-tenant B2B SaaS architecture, including row-level security or equivalent tenant isolation patterns in PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with compliance-conscious engineering environments. Our buyers are controllers and finance leaders who need audit-grade output, and the systems you build will need to reflect that from the start.
• Strong written communication and a collaborative, low-ego working style.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AST parsing or static code analysis using tools such as tree-sitter, Python's ast module, or the TypeScript compiler API.
• Advanced PostgreSQL skills, including schema design, query optimization, and row-level security for multi-tenant systems.
• Working knowledge of React and TypeScript, sufficient to ship occasional front-end changes.
• Experience integrating with LLM provider APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google at scale, including managing cost attribution, token-level billing structures, and latency tradeoffs in production.
• Prior experience in fintech, FinOps, accounting technology, or related financial domains.
• Previous experience as an early engineer at a startup.
• GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD pipeline experience.

Who You Are

• You thrive in early-stage environments where priorities evolve in response to customer signal.
• You favor pragmatic delivery over architectural perfection, while making thoughtful long-term investments in code and infrastructure.
• You bring strong judgment to technical and product decisions and partner effectively with non-engineering colleagues.
• You are interested in the finance and accounting domain and motivated to learn the work that controllers and finance teams do every day.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary of $160,000 to $180,000, commensurate with experience.
• Founding Agentic Engineer equity, with a four year vesting schedule and a one year cliff.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Remote-first work environment with an annual company offsite.

How to Apply

• Please submit a brief note describing a production system you have built, the most challenging aspects of the work, and what you would do differently in hindsight. Links to GitHub, technical writing, conference talks, or other relevant work are welcome.
• Tonifo is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to building an inclusive team.