Senior Software Engineer (Early-stage startup)

Continuum Recruiting looking for a Sr Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience building software products. Who brings a strong combination of and hands-on development of a product with AI/agentic systems. You should be comfortable owning features end-to-end in a fast-moving, early-stage environment, and have a track record of shipping features. Bonus points if you've been a founding or early engineer at a startup.

The EXCITING stuff:

• Work directly with the founders — You'll report straight to the founding team and have a real seat at the table. No layers of management between you and the people shaping the product.
• Greenfield backend ownership — You're not inheriting someone else's mess. You'll architect and build core systems from scratch with full ownership over technical decisions.
• Security work that actually matters — You'll design and ship security-critical features like BYOK encryption and access controls for some of the world's largest enterprises. This isn't checkbox compliance work.
• AI agent work at the frontier — You'll build LLM-powered agents and AI systems that are redefining how enterprises handle contracts. It's genuinely cutting-edge applied AI work.
• Backed and acquired —You get startup energy and ownership with enterprise-scale distribution and resources behind you.

What you’ll do:

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable software products and features powered by agentic AI systems.
• Build robust agent workflows that integrate LLMs, APIs, databases, business systems, and external tools.
• Build and deploy AI-powered agents and systems in Python to automate complex contract workflows
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Drive end-to-end ownership of features from concept through deployment and ongoing operation.
• Translate product requirements into concrete technical systems and shipped features, working directly with customers and internal stakeholders
• Establish engineering best practices, tooling, and culture as an early member of a small, high-impact team

Your background:

• 5+ years of experience in building and shipping production backend systems in a startup or high-​ownership environment.
• Strong Python production-level code for ML and Agentic Infrastructure
• Designed or implemented security-​sensitive systems (encryption,​ key management,​ auth).​
• Built or deployed AI/ML or LLM-​powered agents in production.​
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS or Azure), including DevOps
• Used JavaScript or TypeScript in a production environment
• Experience building Agentic systems end-to-end.​ Understanding Agentic harness MCP and Orchestration well enough to do a Systems Design around them.​
• Comfortable translating ambiguous enterprise security requirements into concrete systems.​
• Must have worked in a small startup under 100 people; could be as a Founder, founding engineer, or early hire.​
• High agency:​ self-​directs,​ identifies and solves problems independently.​
• Willing to work in-​office in New York for 5 days/week.​

Benefits:

• Robust medical (physical & mental vision, and dental benefits
• Employee assistance program (EAP)
• Generous 401K match
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Generous holiday and PTO program
• CaaS (coaching as a service)
• Annual personal development allowance
• 7 Days for Humanity – 7 paid volunteer days annually
• Global and regional DEIB steering committees, employee resource groups (ERGs)
• Global DEIB training programs and guest speakers throughout the year