Founding Engineer — AI Research Agents (Full-Stack)

What you’ll do

• Design and ship agentic systems (tool calling, multi-agent workflows, structured outputs) that reliably fetch, extract, and normalize data across the web and APIs.
• Build and operate search/indexing pipelines on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch (schema design, analyzers, reindex/data migration strategies, relevance tuning).
• Own robust web scraping: directory crawling, CAPTCHA handling, headless browsers, rotating proxies, anti-bot evasion, and backoff/retry policies.
• Develop backend services in Python + FastAPI with clean contracts and strong observability.
• Scale workloads on AWS + Docker (batch/queue workers, autoscaling, fault tolerance, cost control).
• Parallelize external API requests safely (rate limits, idempotency, circuit breakers, retries, dedupe).
• Integrate third-party APIs for enrichment and search; model and cache responses; manage schema evolution.
• Transform and analyze data using Pandas (or similar) for normalization, QA, and reporting.
• Pitch in across the stack: billing (Stripe), and occasional front-end changes to ship end-to-end features.

Minimum requirements

• Hands-on experience with agentic architectures (tool calling, structured outputs/JSON, planning/execution loops) and prompt engineering.
• Deep knowledge of OpenSearch/Elasticsearch: index design, analyzers, ingestion pipelines, snapshots, rolling upgrades, and zero-downtime reindexing/data migrations.
• Proven web scraping expertise: solving CAPTCHAs, session/auth flows, proxy rotation, stealth techniques, and legal/ethical constraints.
• AWS + Docker in production (at least two of: ECS/EKS, Lambda, SQS/SNS, Batch, Step Functions, CloudWatch).
• Building high-throughput data/IO pipelines with concurrency (asyncio/multiprocessing), resilient retries, and rate-limit aware scheduling.
• Integrating diverse external APIs (auth patterns, pagination, webhooks); designing stable interfaces and backfills.
• Strong data wrangling with Pandas or equivalent; comfort with large CSV/Parquet workflows and memory/perf tuning.
• Familiarity with Stripe (subscriptions, metered billing, webhooks) and basic front-end changes (React/TypeScript or similar).
• Excellent ownership, product sense, and pragmatic debugging.

Nice to have

• Entity resolution/record linkage at scale (probabilistic matching, blocking, deduping).
• Experience with Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, or similar for tracing/evals; task queues (Celery/RQ), Redis, Postgres.
• Search relevance (BM25/vector/hybrid), embeddings, and retrieval pipelines.
• Playwright/Selenium, stealth browsers, anti-bot frameworks, CAPTCHA providers.
• CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Terraform), and cost/perf observability.
• Security & compliance basics for data handling and PII.