Software Engineer – AI Backend (Founding Role)

About This Role

We are looking for a full-time founding engineer to help build an agentic AI platform that empowers local governments and businesses. In this role, you will directly shape our conversational AI platform, driving impact for U.S. local governments through geospatial and intelligent AI solutions. You'll work closely with the co-founders, gain technical mentorship & guidance, and have the opportunity to grow alongside the company as we scale.

About Conflation Labs

• We're an early-stage startup based in the Bay Area.
• Mission: Creating intelligent, geospatial, and AI-powered solutions for local governments and businesses.
• We are a small team with a culture of high ownership, rapid iteration, and close collaboration with customers.
• As a founding engineer, you'll work on impactful projects that span every layer of the stack.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement backend services for conversational AI pipelines.
• Deploy, monitor, and scale multi-tenant chat services.
• Improve prompts and evaluation workflows for agentic AI responses.
• Build testing/evaluation frameworks to measure response accuracy and reliability.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/CE (or equivalent experience).
• 1–2 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong interest in agentic AI and end-to-end software development.
• Willingness to learn across the stack (databases, backend, AI/ML, simple UI/UX).
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Delivered production features with maintainable, well-structured code that avoids piling up technical debt. Takes ownership for long-term stability of the system beyond just "getting it to work."
• Experience with agenetic IDE like windsurf, cursor, claude code.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong Python experience, especially with FastAPI.
• Experience with agentic frameworks (agents, prompt engineering, evaluation).
• Solid foundations in RAG architecture, LLMs, and embeddings.
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks (Ragas, LangSmith, DeepEval).
• Experience with PostgreSQL, vector DBs, and ArcGIS/geospatial data.

What We Offer

• Technical mentorship (from a co-founder with 12+ years of SWE background) and hands-on experience building a real AI platform from scratch.
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI/ML technologies and software engineering practices.
• Opportunity to shape the technical direction as a founding engineer.
• Compensation: up to $700-1,000 / month.