Founding AI Engineer
Location: New York, NY (Hybrid – 4 days in office)
Company: Alinea Invest
Alinea is building the investing platform for the next generation.
- Post-Series A
- 2.5M+ downloads
- 200K+ funded accounts
We’re hiring a Founding AI Engineer to lead the development of AI systems powering the next generation of intelligent financial tools at Alinea. You will own and evolve AI Allie, our in-app AI investing companion, and help shape how AI is integrated across the entire Alinea platform.
This role sits at the intersection of large language models, financial data, and product experience. You’ll build systems that help users learn about investing, make decisions, and engage more deeply with their finances.
What You’ll Do
- Own the architecture and development of AI systems powering AI Allie
- Build and ship LLM-powered product features used by hundreds of thousands of users
- Design retrieval systems that ground model responses in financial data and internal knowledge
- Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, reasoning accuracy, and safety
- Improve model performance, latency, and cost efficiency in production
- Build infrastructure for prompt orchestration, memory, and contextual personalization
- Design guardrails appropriate for financial products and regulated environments
- Rapidly prototype and ship new AI-driven product capabilities
What We’re Looking For
- 3+ years of experience building production software systems
- Experience building and shipping LLM-powered applications
- Strong understanding of prompt design, model behavior, and evaluation techniques
- Experience building RAG systems, embeddings pipelines, or retrieval architectures
- Strong backend engineering skills (APIs, data pipelines, system design)
- Ability to move quickly from prototype to production
- Strong product intuition and desire to build user-facing AI experiences
Nice to Have
- Experience building AI features in consumer products
- Experience working with financial or structured data
- Experience optimizing model cost and latency at scale
- Experience with fine-tuning, evaluation pipelines, or model experimentation
Working at Alinea
- Hybrid work environment: 4 days per week in our New York office
- Work directly with the founding team
- High ownership and the opportunity to shape AI at a rapidly growing fintech company
🚀 Y Combinator Company Info
Y Combinator Batch: W21
Team Size: 12 employees
Industry: Financial Technology and Services -> Consumer Finance
Company Description: Automated investing for the next generation 💸
💰 Compensation
Salary Range: $160,000 - $200,000
📋 Job Details
Job Type: Full-time
Experience Level: Any (new grads ok)
Engineering Type: Full stack
Time to Hire: 14