Founding Engineer, Data & AI

Apply on YC · Original job listing

• Role: Engineering / Backend
• Experience: 3+ years
• Visa: US citizen/visa only
• Skills: Go, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Python, TypeScript, SQL, Docker, ETL, gRPC, Terraform, LLMs, AI Agents, LangChain, BigQuery, Generative AI, NestJS, OpenAI, LangSmith, Datadog

Full-time. Founding team. New York City, in-person required. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO and works directly with both founders and domain experts.

About Pennant

Pennant is a YC-backed company building software for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting and company engagement.

Institutional investors, public companies and their advisors make consequential decisions using information scattered across filings, policies, research and conversations. We bring that information together so teams can understand the evidence, apply their own judgment and preserve why they made a decision.

Our ambition is a world model for corporate governance: a system that connects institutional knowledge, policies, decisions and outcomes. Getting there starts with reliable data and software customers trust in their daily work.

The role

Build and own the data systems that make Pennant useful and trustworthy.

This is a backend- and data-intensive applied AI role. You should be as comfortable debugging a production pipeline and evolving a database schema as evaluating a document-extraction model. You will build on an existing codebase, working with messy filings and customer documents and making the results dependable enough for customers to use. The work includes asynchronous jobs, versioned evidence and safe reprocessing, not just prompts and model experiments.

Your first mandate is one prioritized pipeline and its downstream use. You will establish what good looks like with domain experts, improve the system, and own it in production. As one of our first engineering hires, you will also help shape how we build, test and operate software.