Astoria AI | Founding AI Engineer — Agentic Systems | Remote (async) | Full-time | Equity-only pre-seed, $190k-$280k + equity post-seed
Astoria AI is building an agentic runtime for human potential — a suite of specialized AI agents serving candidates and companies across the entire hiring and talent lifecycle: career strategy, networking intelligence, verified matching, compliance-native hiring, onboarding, and retention.
The hiring market is structurally broken: 44% of resumes contain fabrications, ATS filters reject 88% of qualified candidates, and 27% of posted jobs are ghost jobs — while regulation (EU AI Act, Mobley v. Workday, FCRA suits) is forcing enterprises to rethink hiring AI. We're building the fix.
You'll own the intelligence layer: LLM-powered agentic workflows (tool use, structured outputs, multi-step orchestration), RAG/retrieval pipelines, lightweight ML for classification/ranking/entity matching, and evaluation loops for hallucination risk and output quality.
Looking for: 6+ years professional SW engineering (Python/TypeScript/APIs/DBs), hands-on experience with LLM APIs and agentic workflows, and ideally RAG/embeddings/vector DB experience beyond basic chatbots.
Stage: pre-launch, pre-seed, founding team, equity-only until seed round closes (~4-6 months), then competitive salary + refresh grants.
Apply: Konstantin.mueller@astoria.ai with „HN“ in subject, plus resume or GitHub
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> Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.
But also: while I didn't post this, that's not uncommon for a founding engineer. They're looking for someone to help start the company from scratch, typically with a healthy dose of equity. It's a calculated risk for the engineer, possibly worth anywhere from zero to a gazillion dollars depending on outcome.
I normally wouldn't comment, but expecting someone with that skillset and those kind of opportunities available to them to work for free for 4-6 months with the promise of actual pay "when our seed round closes" was so egregious I couldn't help myself, sorry.
That's common for founders, though. The CEO and CTO etc. are almost certainly in the same boat. They're not so much saying "come work for free" as "come join this group of us who are taking a leap from our current jobs and building something brand new, in hopes it'll pay off wildly."
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It's not typical for founding engineers. It's plausible for a cofounder, with 30%-50% equity.
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