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Founding Full?Stack Engineer (NYC)

Founding Full?Stack Engineer (NYC)

KnitNew York, NY, United States
2 hours ago
Job type
  • Full-time
Job description

Founding Full Stack Engineer

We're building our foundational NYC engineering team from scratch and looking for exceptional builders who are resourceful, deeply technical, and thrive in high-ownership environments. As one of the first in-house engineers, you'll shape the core of our platform and the culture of a team that will scale to 20+ over the next 18 months. You'll build and orchestrate AI agents, pioneer new UX paradigms, and tackle some of the hardest problems in applied AI with autonomy and end-to-end ownership.

Business Impact | What you will own

  • Own 0?1 and 1?N features across the stack, from design docs to building high-throughput data pipelines and scalable FastAPI services.
  • Architect and own the core agent orchestration engine, designing complex, multi-agent LLM workflows (routing, tool-use, memory, evaluation) with deterministic fallbacks, guardrails, and auditable actions required by enterprise users.
  • Build AI-native, human-in-the-loop UIs. Craft React / Next.js interfaces that let users collaborate safely with agents, with transparency and explainability by design.
  • Develop the "factory for the factory". Build our experimentation platform : CI / CD for prompts and agents, offline / online evals, drift detection, safety layers, and rollout controls.
  • Ship fast, safely. You'll instrument everything for reliability, write concise design docs, add robust tests, and build dashboards and alerts for features you launch.
  • Partner cross-functionally with Product, AI, Design, CS; talk to customers and SMEs, and turn ambiguous problems into shipped product.
  • Obsess over performance, optimizing for latency across the system : caching, model selection, distillation, batching, vector search, and infrastructure efficiency (GPU / CPU).
  • Operate what you build. This includes on-call ownership, leading incident response, and driving learning through blameless postmortems.

Our Stack

  • Frontend : React, Next.js
  • Backend : Python, FastAPI
  • Data / ML : MongoDB, S3, Redis; Pinecone
  • Infra : AWS, Docker, Kubernetes; CI / CD with GitHub Actions
  • Messaging : SQS; event-driven pipelines

    • This role is for you if...

  • You're a 0 ? 1 builder who thrives in ambiguity and has shipped products from scratch at a startup or in a hyper-growth phase. You've seen both - early-stage hustle and later-stage scale and know how to build for it.
  • You're a systems thinker with deep technical chops : you design clear architectures and write clean, tested Python and TypeScript.
  • You think like an owner : you spot problems, propose solutions, and build them without waiting for perfect specs. Your impact is measured in business outcomes.
  • You use AI as leverage. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code are integral to your workflow, helping you ship faster while maintaining a high standard for correctness.
  • You believe speed and quality aren't opposites and can articulate the tradeoffs you make.
  • You communicate crisply. You share your ideas effectively and thrive in tight feedback loops with product, design, and customers.
  • You've got grit : hard problems energize you, context switching doesn't scare you, and you're comfortable deleting code.

    • This role is NOT for you if...

  • You see a hard line between "frontend," "backend," and "product."
  • You are uncomfortable with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and dynamic priorities.
  • You are looking for a predictable, 9-to-5 role.

    • Required Skills & Experiences

  • Experience with LLM / agent systems, evals, and prompt tooling; RAG, embeddings, vector dbs.
  • Deep knowledge of event-driven systems, streaming, and workflow engines.
  • Expertise in observability (OpenTelemetry / Prometheus / Datadog), feature flagging, or A / B platforms.
  • Background in enterprise security and compliance (SOC 2, GDPR)
  • Bias to action : short specs, small PRs, daily deploys.
  • In-person collaboration : we're building the NYC hub together; whiteboards >

    • long threads.

  • High ownership : you'll touch product, talk to customers, and influence the roadmap.

    • Benefits

    Upon joining the Knit team in this foundational role, you will receive a competitive salary, Equity Options, Healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), and Additional Coverage, a company laptop and one-time, onboarding Technology Stipend, a 401(k) with company match, flexible time-off, hybrid working, and more!

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    Fullstack Engineer • New York, NY, United States