Founding AI Engineer at Alinea (W21)
$160K - $200K
Automated investing for the next generation 💸
New York, NY, US
Full-time
Will sponsor
Any (new grads ok)
About Alinea

Alinea is an investing app for GenZs. We’re a Y Combinator backed start-up and have raised $5.5M from top investors including Goodwater Capital, F7 Ventures, and GFR.

We are looking to build out a team of passionate and driven individuals who want to make an impact. Come join us!

About the role

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
Technology
  • iOS Swift
  • Next.js + Typescript 4 + Node.js(Express) + Firebase + Socket.io + Redux
  • MongoDB + AWS(EB, EC2, CloudWatch, CodeDeploy)
  • Swift 5 + Programmatic UI + MVVM-C Architecture

Other jobs at Alinea

fulltimeNew York, NY, USFull stack$160K - $200KAny (new grads ok)

fulltimeNew York, NY, USFull stack$160K - $200KAny (new grads ok)

fulltimeNew York, NY, USFull stack$125K - $185K0.10% - 0.30%3+ years

Hundreds of YC startups are hiring on Work at a Startup.

Sign up to see more ›