Senior / Staff Founding Engineer (AI/ML & Full-Stack)

Company Description

Suede is an AI-powered platform tailored for modern fashion brands and retailers. We streamline product creation and buying workflows by converting line sheets, PDFs, and images into shoppable, structured data, ready for e-commerce sites in seconds. Our tools empower merchandisers with automated product uploads, social media trend tracking, and digital twin infrastructure to enhance decision-making and future-proof their brands. Built by merchandisers and powered by AI, Suede bridges the gap between inspiration and inventory, helping brands move faster, buy smarter, and sell better.

We’re early. The impact surface is massive. We are looking for an entrepreneurial engineer who wants to build with us from the ground floor and deeply influence both our product direction and technical architecture.

Role Description

As a Senior / Staff Founding Engineer, you will bridge the gap between heavy AI/ML systems and production-grade full-stack architecture. You’ll partner directly with the founders to own Suede's core infrastructure, moving fluidly between training/tuning multimodal models and shipping highly responsive user experiences.

This is a high-autonomy, hands-on role. You will take proven prototypes and harden them into scalable production systems, architect multi-agent systems, and design data-ingestion pipelines capable of handling messy, unstructured retail documents at scale. You should thrive in highly ambiguous environments, enjoy solving first-principles technical challenges, and be passionate about building elegant, clean codebases without sacrificing velocity.

What You’ll Do (Responsibilities)

Architect & Build: Design and implement robust, end-to-end full-stack features using TypeScript/Node, Next.js, and Python.
Multi-Agent AI Orchestration: Build, evaluate, and scale agentic AI workflows, multimodal pipelines (Vision/Text), and advanced RAG architectures that operate deterministically.
Data Ingestion Infrastructure: Own the complex data extraction layer, building high-throughput pipelines to parse PDFs, images, emails, and spreadsheets into structured e-commerce data.
Technical Leadership: Define early architectural patterns, manage technical debt, and ensure our systems scale seamlessly from 10 to 10,000+ users.
Integrations: Develop and maintain core backend services, robust API layers (REST/GraphQL), and deep integrations with e-commerce systems like Shopify.

Technical Core & Requirements
Must-Have Experience

Years of Experience: 7–12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade applications.
AI/ML Production Depth: Real-world experience deploying LLM applications, multimodal vision models, agentic orchestration frameworks, and robust evaluation systems (beyond basic prompt engineering).
Full-Stack Proficiency: Expert-level capability with Python (for ML/data pipelines) AND TypeScript / Node / Next.js / React (for robust backend services and user interfaces).
System Design & Scale: Strong mastery of asynchronous architectures, event-driven systems, message queues, and Postgres database optimization.
Startup Mindset: Ability to triage, take loosely defined user problems, and independently deliver clean, production-ready solutions.

Bonus (Huge Advantage)
Prior experience as a senior founding engineer or early employee at a fast-growing startup.
Experience building Shopify apps, custom API integrations, or deep e-commerce infrastructure.
Deep knowledge of advanced document processing (Vision Models, layout-aware vision models, or embedding strategies).
Expertise with AI Agents, observability, cost tracking, and mitigation strategies for model drift/hallucinations.

Key Job Skills
Agentic AI Systems & Orchestration
Multimodal AI (Vision + Text)
Python & TypeScript
React & Next.js
RAG Pipelines & Embeddings
High-Scale System Design (Async Workers, Queues)
REST & GraphQL API Design
Postgres & Data Modeling

What’s in it for you?
High Ownership & Autonomy: Shape the product, tech stack, and engineering culture from day one.
Direct Founder Collaboration: Work side-by-side with the founding team with zero bureaucratic layers.
Elite AI Ecosystem: Work in person out of the AI House in Seattle, featuring an active community, daily lunches, mentorship, and proximity to top tier AI founders and researchers.