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Founding Engineer

Be the engineer the
product is built around.

Hughes is an AI teammate for credit unions — disputes worked end to end, data answered in minutes. We're hiring one founding engineer to own the technical core and shape where it goes.

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The role

Founding Engineer — full-stack + AI

Fully remote · India Full-time role Competitive cash + founding equity

This is a rare amount of ownership. You'll shape the architecture, set the engineering bar, and have a direct hand in how the product works and where it goes — not just execute a backlog. The surface area is wide: the AI analyst engine, the data layer, the application, and the infrastructure. And the architectural decisions you make are the ones the product will live with for years — so this seat leans as hard on design judgment as it does on shipping speed.

If you've ever wanted to be the technical foundation of a product — in a multi-trillion-dollar industry that modern software has badly underserved — this is that seat.

What you'll do

Own the core, across the whole stack

Five things this role is really about — from the long-term shape of the system down to shipping it.

Own the architecture
Hold an opinionated, long-term view of how the system evolves. Design the boundaries that keep it correct, legible and easy to change as it grows — and know which decisions are one-way doors.
Design the agentic layer
Build the agent patterns behind our natural-language analyst: grounding, tool use, multi-step reasoning, guardrails against hallucination, and evals that prove the agents are getting better, not just different.
Build voice into the product
Bring working knowledge of voice models — speech-to-text, text-to-speech, realtime voice — and help make talking to your data as natural as asking a colleague.
Make reliability & trust real
Build the eval harness, observability, guardrails and lineage/audit trails that let financial institutions depend on every answer the product gives.
Build full-stack, ship fast
From the React front end to the Python services to the data and infrastructure underneath — you'll have your hands on all of it, with tight loops between building and shipping.
What we're looking for

Builders with design judgment

You don't need a long résumé or a brand-name degree. You need to have built real things — and to think clearly.

Core — what we screen for
  • ~2–4 years building and shipping production software (we care far more about what you've shipped than years on paper).
  • Strong architectural instinct — the thing we care about most. You've made deliberate design decisions on a non-trivial system and can reason clearly about trade-offs and how a design holds up as requirements change.
  • Strong in Python and TypeScript / React — comfortable across backend and frontend.
  • Hands-on building with LLMs / agentic systems, with something concrete to show — a repo, a demo, a write-up — and a real grasp of their failure modes.
  • Verification discipline — you trust tests, traces and evals over vibes, and can tell when an agent is solving the wrong problem.
  • Comfort with ambiguity and ownership, and a high forward-lean for a fast-moving, high-ownership role.
Bonus — nice to have
  • Working knowledge of voice models / realtime speech.
  • SQL and data modeling (dbt or similar warehouse-style transforms) — we live in this.
  • Exposure to regulated or financial data, fintech, or BI / analytics products.
  • Production observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) and strong CI discipline.
Python TypeScript / React LLMs & agents Evals & observability dbt / SQL Realtime voice
The honest version

High ownership, real ambition, and a lot to build. You'll own more than you would at a larger company and move faster than you thought you could. Some weeks are intense. The upside is meaningful equity, a direct line to every technical decision, and the chance to be the engineer the product is built around.

How to apply

No formal cover letter needed. Show us how you think and what you've made.

Email your application

Applications go to careers@tryhughes.com

Hughes AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire on demonstrated ability and evaluate every application on its merits — regardless of background, school, or pedigree.