Founding Product Engineer / Scientific AI
Location: New York, New York, USA
Compensation: $150,000-$200,000 base salary + benefits (depending on experience)
We’re looking for a Founding Product Engineer to join an early-stage, mission-driven team building software for researchers. This is the company’s first product engineering hire, with broad ownership across product, UX, and engineering.
You will build the core interfaces and systems that help researchers move from reading and exploration to experimentation and insight, faster.
Why consider this role
You want to work on tools that directly support scientific discovery.
You enjoy early-stage environments where you can shape both the product and the engineering foundation.
You like owning features end-to-end, from user research through shipping.
You are excited by modern AI tooling and new interaction patterns.
What you will do
Design and build core product surfaces that unify a researcher’s workflow into a single interface.
Integrate with key parts of the research stack, including computational environments, paper discovery services, and external scientific databanks.
Partner closely with an AI-focused founding engineer to build infrastructure for long-running agents that can reason, plan, and adapt over time.
Build interaction systems that capture and persist user context over time, enabling better personalization and continuity across sessions.
Work directly with users to understand workflows, identify opportunities, and iterate quickly.
Contribute across the stack to prototype, refine, and ship features, while helping establish strong engineering fundamentals.
Tech stack
Full-stack product engineering environment (details shared during the process)
Modern web application tooling
AI and agent-oriented infrastructure
What we are looking for
Strong product engineering instincts: you can translate ambiguous user needs into simple, high-leverage product decisions.
Full-stack capability and comfort moving across frontend, backend, and data integrations.
Experience designing and shipping user-facing interfaces.
Ability to collaborate closely with researchers or other deeply technical users.
High ownership and a track record of shipping.
Bonus points
Research experience (academic or industry) or a strong personal interest in science.
Experience with AI-assisted products, developer tools, or new interaction models.
Comfort operating in fast-moving, early-stage teams.
If you are interested in learning more about this role, please fill out the form below or reach out to us on LinkedIn!