About the job
The Opportunity
We are seeking a pioneering Founding AI Engineer to develop systems that ensure AI operates in a safe, reliable, and repeatable manner at Grand. This pivotal role focuses on transforming intelligence into production-ready capabilities, combining an AI-first approach with engineering instincts for control, failure handling, and system integrity.
This role is distinct from product feature development or research; you will not be responsible for user experience or model theory. Instead, your ownership will encompass AI operations within the system, including orchestration, guardrails, observability, auditability, and lifecycle management.
As a close collaborator with the founders, product, data science, and regulatory teams, you will influence how AI decisions are triggered, constrained, inspected, and executed in a regulated environment. This position offers a chance to contribute significantly to the company's foundational structure.
Your Responsibilities
- Design and implement the runtime and orchestration layer for AI systems across our platform.
- Transform probabilistic AI outputs into controlled, repeatable behaviors within the system.
- Define the processes for triggering, gating, validating, and executing AI decisions.
- Integrate guardrails, fallbacks, and confidence thresholds into AI workflows.
- Design human-in-the-loop and escalation pathways as necessary.
- Manage prompt lifecycle, including evaluation and versioning.
- Oversee context assembly, scoping, and data boundaries for AI tasks.
- Establish systems for logging, tracing, replaying, and auditing AI processes.
- Control latency, cost, reliability, and performance in production environments.
- Collaborate closely with AI data scientists to transition models and signals into production.
- Work together with product engineers to ensure safe AI integration within workflows.
- Ensure that AI systems are defensible, inspectable, and ready for regulatory scrutiny.
