About the role
We are looking for a Founding AI Product Engineer with 3–6 years of experience to own and productize the core backend platform at Arzana — a YC-backed AI company automating the front office of American manufacturing. You'll be one of four or five engineers who build the agent runtime, extraction frameworks, and integration infrastructure that powers all 22+ customers, not just one. This is a greenfield role with real ownership: you define what becomes part of the platform.
What will you be doing?
- Build and own a core domain of the backend platform — agent runtime, extraction pipelines, ERP integration frameworks, or evals — with your work shipping to all customers
- Productize and unify existing solutions: take six overlapping order entry tools with 20% shared code and get that to 80–85% reuse
- Pair with Forward Deployed Engineers on customer requirements that have no framework yet, and decide what gets built into the platform
- Ship fast — new customers go live in under a week, and you're one of the people who makes that true
- Occasional travel (~5 days/month) to customer plants to watch real users interact with what you've built
Key Requirements
- Production AI systems experience — multi-step agent pipelines, RAG, VLM extraction, evals running for real users
- Strong Python and real architectural range across backend, data, and cloud (AWS); full-stack capability a plus
- Proven end-to-end product ownership — you can point to shipped products and explain every decision
- CS or STEM degree (Bachelor's minimum); founder, co-founder, CTO, or founding engineer experience strongly preferred
- U.S. person as defined under 22 CFR 120.62 (ITAR compliance required); based in or willing to relocate to New York
About Arzana
Arzana is an AI platform company rebuilding the front office of American manufacturing — automating order entry, quoting, RFQ processing, purchasing, AP/AR, and customer service for manufacturers who still run on fax machines and decade-old spreadsheets. Founded by Marshall Kools and William Alexander, two Stanford engineers and third-generation manufacturing families from Wisconsin and Iowa, the company was born from a deeply personal frustration: watching family businesses spend hours every day on manual data entry and slow quoting cycles. Arzana graduated from Y Combinator's P26 batch, raised a $4.3M seed round, and has grown 30% month over month — 10x-ing revenue during YC alone. Today, Arzana serves 22 customers ranging from 20-person shops to Fortune 500 manufacturers, and has processed over 100,000 purchase orders. The platform deploys semi-custom AI agents built primarily in Python, running on isolated AWS instances so no customer data leaves for outside providers, and already integrates with MES and computer vision systems. The team is seven people strong, headquartered in New York, and operates with a high-ownership, fast-moving culture where every engineer leads their own projects end-to-end — from client communication to deployment. The founders' long-term mission is to fully automate 10,000 factories by 2035, starting with order entry and quoting and expanding to full office and floor operations.
Required skills
Other roles at Arzana
Job details
Salary
$215,000 - $235,000
Equity
0.25% - 0.5%
Location
New York, United States
Experience
3+ years
Funding
Total raised
$500K
Last stage
Seed
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.