Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer

Location: Paris — on-site
Type: Full-time
Start date: ASAP
Compensation: salary + equity

About the company

Our client is a seed-funded AI startup building the infrastructure for autonomous factories.

Manufacturing depends on expertise that often lives in experienced workers’ heads. When those people leave, critical knowledge leaves with them, contributing to repeated mistakes, downtime and lost productivity.

The company’s first product makes capturing that expertise simple: factory teams film an expert at work, and an AI agent turns the video into a structured procedure in under two minutes.

The next step is connecting that knowledge across processes, products and machines, giving AI systems the context they need to support operations and identify improvements.

Founded through Entrepreneur First and based at Station F, the company is already deploying with major industrial businesses. Following its seed round, it is hiring exceptional early engineers to shape the product and its technical foundations.

The role

As a Founding AI Engineer, you will work directly with the CTO to design, build and own core systems. Decisions you make in the coming months will shape how the product develops over the coming years.

This is a hands-on engineering role combining applied AI, data modelling and production software development.

What you will do

• Model factory operations. Build the context graph connecting processes, products, machines and procedures—the core data structure underpinning the platform.

• Build AI agents. Develop systems that make factory expertise accessible and help teams answer questions, troubleshoot issues and improve operations.

• Own data ingestion. Turn videos, documents and machine data into clean, structured information that AI systems can use reliably.

• Make retrieval work. Design how knowledge is chunked, indexed, retrieved and delivered to agents.

• Ship production systems. Take ownership from technical design through implementation, deployment and ongoing improvement.

• Set engineering standards. Help establish the tooling, architecture and development practices adopted by future hires.

Who we are looking for

We are looking for engineers with at least three years of professional software engineering experience, supported by one or both of the following:

• An exceptional academic background: a degree from a top-five institution in France, or an internationally comparable leading institution.

• A standout professional track record: experience as a CTO, technical lead or founding engineer at a technically impressive startup, or a strong engineering career at companies such as Palantir, Doctolib, Helsing, Aircall, Pigment or Uber.

You should also bring:

• Strong software fundamentals. You understand what happens beneath the abstractions and can design and debug complex systems.

• Sound data modelling judgement. You think carefully about entities, relationships and schemas, and have built models that support evolving product requirements.

• Practical applied AI experience. You have shipped LLM, RAG or agent-based systems for real users and understand their limitations.

• Evidence of delivery. You can explain what you personally built, the decisions you made and what you learned when things broke in production.

• Ownership and accountability. You drive work through to completion, communicate risks early and deliver without constant supervision.

• An entrepreneurial mindset. You are comfortable with ambiguity, move quickly, welcome feedback and understand the intensity and hours involved in an early-stage company.

• Independent judgement. You use AI development tools effectively while retaining responsibility for the quality and originality of your work.

• Excellent written and spoken English. French is a plus.

Technology stack

Area
Technologies

Backend
Python, FastAPI

Frontend
Next.js, TypeScript, React

AI
Context graphs, RAG, agentic workflows

Data and infrastructure
GCP, Cloud Run, Spanner, Cloud Tasks, Supabase / PostgreSQL

CI/CD
Cloud Build

Experience with every technology is not required, but you should be able to learn quickly.

What is on offer

• Competitive salary and equity.

• Direct collaboration with the founders.

• Significant ownership over core product and architectural decisions.

• Real industrial deployments and technically demanding problems.

• The opportunity to help build the engineering team and grow with the company.

How the team works

The team values ambition, trust, low ego and accountability. Engineers are given autonomy and are expected to take responsibility for outcomes, challenge ideas constructively and support colleagues when problems arise.

This is an opportunity for someone who wants to help build a company, as well as its technology.