Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer — AdAI
Full-time · New York City (On-site)

About AdAI

AdAI is a stealth-stage startup building the fastest way to turn any winning ad into your ad. Upload a reference ad, pick your product, and get back on-brand creative with your exact pricing, product details, and disclaimers injected verbatim, in minutes instead of weeks. We have a six-figure anchor customer signed in digital health and a pipeline of early users behind it. The long-term vision is a closed-loop system: generate creative, launch it, measure performance, and regenerate what wins.
The role

You will be the engineer who builds AdAI's product from the ground up. Not a corner of a codebase, and not a legacy system to maintain: the architecture, the stack, and the first shipped version are yours to get right, with a paying customer waiting on the other end.

You will:

• Own the MVP end to end: the chat-style generation workspace, the product configuration dashboard, and the pipeline that deconstructs reference ads and rebuilds them with a customer's exact details.
• Make the foundational technical decisions (stack, architecture, model orchestration, infrastructure) and live with them, which is the best reason to make them well. - Orchestrate generative AI models for image and video creation, and build the quality gates that keep brand names, pricing, and disclaimers pixel-accurate.
• Work directly with the CEO. You are the technical side of the company: no engineering manager above you, no one to escalate to, and full credit for what ships.
• Hire and lead the engineers who come after you. This is a role for someone who has shipped real systems and wants the rare, unleveraged version of the founding-engineer job: first commit to first customer, alone at the keyboard.

What we're looking for:

• 1 to 3 years of professional experience, including at least one system you built or owned largely on your own in production. We will ask about it in detail.
• Able to architect and ship a complete product solo: frontend, APIs, data model, deployment, monitoring. Strong in TypeScript or Python.
• Hands-on experience building on generative AI APIs (image or video generation, LLMs) in products or serious projects. You do not need to train models. You need to make them reliable.
• AI-native in how you build. Fluent with tools like Claude Code or Cursor, and you use them to ship at a pace a solo engineer couldn't otherwise sustain, while owning and understanding every line that ships.
• Self-directed to a fault. There is no ticket queue here. You will often be the one deciding what to build next, with the CEO setting the destination.
• Bonus: media processing (ffmpeg, rendering pipelines), ad tech or the Meta Marketing API, or prior early-stage startup experience.

What you get:

• Meaningful equity. A founding-engineer grant under our stock option plan, sized for someone carrying the technical side of the company.
• Salary: $90,000 to 120,000, calibrated to experience.
• Total ownership of a product customers are already paying for, and the compressed learning of a true zero-to-one.
• Direct access to how a company actually gets built, including the parts most engineers never see.
• Flexible PTO.

To apply:

Email [email protected] with a short note about the most impressive thing you have built largely on your own (links beat descriptions) and your resume or LinkedIn. We reply to everyone within a few days.

The process, start to finish:

1. Intro call (30 min) — mutual fit, your background, our roadmap. With the CEO, not a recruiter.

2. Technical deep-dive (60 min) — a detailed conversation about a system you actually shipped: the decisions, the trade-offs, what broke, what you'd redo.

3. Paid project (short, scoped, compensated) — a small build that mirrors the real job. You keep the payment either way; we both learn whether this works.
   Offer follows within days of the project, not weeks.