Founding AI Engineer

Interfere is building the self-healing layer of the internet: software that detects issues, diagnoses root causes, and ships fixes before anyone notices something’s broken. The goal is to empower founders, product managers, and designers to understand how the product they're building _actually_ works in the real world. Software runs civilization. When it breaks, the world stutters. We're building its immune system. This is not a normal job – it demands taste, intensity, and obsession. Difficulty wakes the genius.

### **The Moment**

AI has democratized shipping code, but excellence remains scarce. We're creating the infrastructure that makes product excellence no longer aspirational but inevitable and expected. We've raised over $5.1M from world class investors like Y Combinator, Vercel Ventures, Hummingbird, Designer Fund, and many others to turn our vision into reality. This isn't about incremental improvements, but about fundamentally changing how reliable software gets built.

### **The Role**

As a Founding AI Engineer, you'll build the intelligence that powers autonomous software repair. You'll design and train systems that understand codebases, reason about failures, and generate fixes that work. This is applied AI at its most consequential - where model performance directly determines whether production systems stay online.

### **The Work**

You'll operate at the intersection of the impossible and the inevitable. This role demands

* **Depth over breadth** – You'll go deeper into problems than most think necessary, finding elegance where others accept complexity
* **Craft at velocity** – Ship exceptional work quickly without compromising on quality that matters. Both form _and_ function, never just one or the other
* **"High Standards Win"** – Question everything, rebuild from scratch when needed, never accept "that's how it's done" or "good enough"
* **Ownership without borders** – Your domain is whatever needs doing to make Interfere exceptional. No excuses

### What You'll Build

* Detection systems that identify anomalies and failures across millions of codebases
* Diagnostic models that trace bugs to root causes through complex execution paths
* Code generation systems that produce fixes developers trust to ship
* Reasoning engines that understand when to act autonomously and when to defer to humans
* Evaluation frameworks that measure what matters - real-world reliability, not benchmark scores
* Infrastructure that serves AI models at scale with latency that doesn't break user experience

### **What We're Looking For**

* **Immense pride** in the work you do and a desire to build the best products on earth
* **Builders with taste**: You know the difference between good and great, and you can't sleep until you've achieved the latter
* **Systems thinkers:** You see patterns others miss, and you understand how AI fits into larger systems. You design for reliability, not just capability
* **Relentless learners:** You dive into unfamiliar domains and emerge with either expertise or a delusional drive to acquire it, and you form hypotheses, run experiments, and let data guide your decisions
* **Clear communicators:** Complex model behaviors become understandable when you explain them
* **Domain experts:** Deep experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or AI infrastructure. You've shipped AI systems that real users depend on.

### **Nice to Have**

* Experience with code analysis, program synthesis, or software engineering AI agents
* Track record with RAG systems, agentic workflows, or multi-step reasoning
* Deep familiarity with model serving infrastructure, vector databases, or real-time inference
* Background in developer tools, observability platforms, or infrastructure
* Portfolio of work that demonstrates exceptionality - research papers, open source contributions, production AI systems you've built

### **What We Offer**

* Founding team equity and competitive compensation
* Complete ownership of meaningful work
* Health, dental, and vision coverage
* Visa sponsorship for exceptional international candidates
* The opportunity to define how AI rebuilds software reliability

### **How We Work**

We're in-person in New York City, and believe proximity accelerates everything that matters, but we'll gladly help you move here. Send us evidence of exceptional work you've shipped - GitHub repos, live products, technical writing - and a note about why Interfere resonates with you. We value proof of who you can be over who you've been.