Senior, Applied AI Engineer

Join to apply for the Senior Software Engineer role at Headstart AI

This range is provided by Headstart AI. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$185,000.00/yr - $185,000.00/yr

About The Company

At Headstart our mission is to bring companies into the age of intelligence and automate software development. We are the team behind the coding agent Friday and are building frontier applied AI technologies including agent orchestration, memory, and more.

We specialize in solving problems with the latest LLM capabilities that deliver measurable outcomes and breakthrough results for organizations in many different industries. As the technology continues to advance at an unprecedented rate, we provide companies with custom software solutions and a suite of tools to stay ahead of the intelligence curve.

About The Team

We are a lean, high-velocity team that ships breakthrough AI capabilities at startup speed. We work directly with our users, iterate rapidly, and measure success by the real-world impact we create for our clients. We believe that simplicity and engineering fundamentals are more important than ever in an AI driven world.

About The Role

• Own and drive the full development lifecycle from ideation through production
• Prototype rapidly while ensuring long-term reliability, maintainability, and security
• Build intuitive, accessible full-stack products from frontend interfaces or internal tools that surface model workflows and automate complex processes
• Architect, build, and maintain scalable APIs and systems that integrate LLMs to power both internal tooling and customer-facing workflows
• Collaborate across teams to identify solutions to data-intensive problemsMentor and support the growth of other engineers while helping to define and drive the technical roadmap

Your background

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong interest in leveraging AI in the development lifecycle (bonus if experience)
• Enjoys a fast-paced and collaborative environment
• Proven track record owning full-stack systems: backend services (Python, FastAPI, Node.js), relational databases (Postgres/MySQL), and optionally frontend frameworks like React/Next.js
• Experience designing distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, or developer productivity infrastructure at scale
• Bonus if you’ve been a founding engineer or startup early hire, with history building production products from scratch
• Bonus if you’re NYC based — we have a loft office in Soho and provide lunch and snacks

Note: Even if you don't meet all the requirements, we still encourage you to apply. This role offers extensive benefits, a base salary of $185,000 USD plus competitive equity compensation and 401k match.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

• Software Development

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Headstart AI by 2x