Founding Engineer

Ryw is a seed-funded, Houston-based AI startup focused on building agentic software for enterprise teams in complex, document-heavy industries. The Founding Engineer will be responsible for developing backend systems and infrastructure for AI products, directly influencing product direction and engineering culture as the company scales.

Responsibilities:

• You'll own the backend platform behind our AI products: multi-agent orchestration, retrieval pipelines, document intelligence workflows, and the infrastructure that makes them reliable enough for enterprise clients to depend on every day
• You'll sit in on client conversations, shape product direction, and have a direct path to engineering leadership as we scale
• Agentic backend systems — multi-agent orchestration, memory architectures, tool-use pipelines, and structured output workflows across multiple product tracks
• RAG pipeline design and evaluation — retrieval strategy, embedding selection, reranking, and systematic quality measurement that goes beyond intuition
• Document intelligence — OCR, structured extraction, entity resolution, and conflict detection over noisy, heterogeneous real-world data
• LLM evaluation and reliability — benchmarking pipelines, quality gates, regression testing, and the observability that gives the team genuine confidence in what we ship
• Cloud infrastructure and cost discipline — serverless or containerized (chosen for the right reasons), with token budgeting, caching, and inference efficiency as a matter of habit
• Early engineering culture — how we review code, make architecture decisions, onboard future engineers, and set the quality bar