Founding Engineer

Job Description

Requirements
- -----------

### Must have:

### - We are looking for a strong systems thinker with solid backend fundamentals, including distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and clear, maintainable code. - We want hands-on experience with modern AI and agentic systems, including LLM orchestration, tool use, memory, context management, subagents, retrieval, evaluation workflows, and guardrails. - We need strong Python skills and comfort with the FastAPI and async ecosystem; familiarity with Go, Rust, TypeScript, SQL, infrastructure-as-code, or React is a plus. - We prefer candidates who have worked with ontologies, graph databases, knowledge graphs, RAG architectures, or complex data pipelines, or who can ramp up quickly in these areas. - We value experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, along with practical judgment around cost, latency, reliability, observability, and security. - We require a security-first mindset, especially when working with sensitive law enforcement data, and familiarity with CJIS-aware environments is important. - We are seeking someone who is entrepreneurial, self-directed, and comfortable making architecture decisions and owning the outcomes. - We expect a proven track record of shipping production systems that hold up under real-world use. - We prefer someone based in or willing to work from the Columbus, Ohio area in a hybrid arrangement. - We require U.S. citizenship to handle sensitive law enforcement data and support our work environment.

Responsibilities:
- ----------------

- We design and build the core agent harness, including subagents, tools, memory, planning, evaluations, monitoring loops, context handling, feedback loops, and guardrails for investigative agents. - We create and maintain data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and structure evidence from structured, unstructured, and external sources such as documents, PDFs, media, forensic exports, agency systems, and OSINT. - We architect and evolve our ontology, which serves as the semantic foundation for reasoning about people, places, events, evidence, leads, theories, and relationships across cases and agencies. - We design backend services, microservices, functions, modules, and APIs that support both the frontend and our agent systems, primarily in Python and FastAPI. - We integrate external data sources and open-source intelligence tools, separating useful signal from noise. - We build evaluation and observability systems to measure performance, identify failure points, and improve the agent through rigorous testing and iteration. - We make architectural decisions that support scaling to hundreds of agencies while balancing performance, speed, reliability, cost, and security. - We work within a CJIS-aware environment and help shape responsible handling of sensitive law enforcement data. - We ship continuously, iterating quickly and rebuilding where needed instead of spending excessive time on design without execution. - We collaborate across the stack when needed, including with UI/UX, design, sales, marketing, and the founder on technical and strategic decisions.
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Company:
- -------

We are Nightwave AI, a law enforcement AI startup building advanced technology to help detectives solve crimes more effectively, efficiently, and accurately. Our mission is to bring intelligence capabilities that were once limited to the largest agencies to every department, while advancing modern investigative methods through ethical and efficient processes. We are a small, fast-moving founding team, and this role is one of our earliest engineering hires with direct access to the founder. The position is hybrid and based in the Columbus, Ohio area, and we offer competitive pay, meaningful early-stage equity, and a flexible schedule. You will work on a serious product with real-world impact, helping shape the future of investigative work and supporting real criminal cases.
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------