Founding Engineer, Data & AI

Pennant, New York, New York

The role

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.

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

What you will do

What you'll own

Build and improve ingestion and extraction pipelines for public filings, external feeds and customer documents. Choose structured sources, deterministic parsing or models based on the task. Make jobs safe to retry, prevent duplicate or stale-worker writes, recover from partial failures, and make missing or stale coverage visible.
Design data models for the entities and relationships your pipeline needs. Preserve source evidence, effective dates and version history so past outputs remain reproducible as data, policies and models change. Distinguish verified facts, model outputs, human decisions and missing information.
Build evaluations with domain reviewers using independently human-reviewed reference cases. Measure completeness, citation support, consequential errors and cases requiring human judgment, not just aggregate agreement. Treat model-generated references as proposals, not ground truth, and turn production failures into regression tests.
Provide reliable services for research, policy application and recommendations. Make reprocessing safe: retain customer corrections, identify affected outputs and flag results that need renewed review.
Protect customer information throughout ingestion, storage, evaluation and reprocessing. Respect tenant boundaries and permitted data uses. Do not assume one customer's documents or decisions can be reused for another.
Operate what you build. Own monitoring, diagnosis and tested recovery for your services. Manage provider usage, caching and processing costs without hiding gaps or sacrificing quality. Reduce manual intervention and document enough that another engineer can release and support them.

You will work closely with our product engineering counterpart, who owns the customer workflow and how people inspect, correct and use the outputs. You own the underlying pipeline and its data-quality contract. Agree on interfaces and failure behavior together, and follow issues through to resolution rather than stopping at a handoff.

The founders set priorities and resolve tradeoffs. Founders and domain reviewers provide policy interpretation and reviewed reference answers; you are not expected to invent governance rules yourself. We will scope your initial work so you can make progress even if the other role has not yet been filled.

Your first 90 days

By day 30: Trace one agreed pipeline from source to customer output, ship an improvement, and establish quality, coverage and operating baselines with domain reviewers.
By day 60: Own that pipeline in production, with reviewed test cases, monitoring, safe reprocessing and a tested recovery procedure.
By day 90: Demonstrate an agreed improvement in reliability, coverage or review effort without sacrificing the quality baseline. Routine releases and diagnosis no longer need a founder to direct each step, and another engineer can operate the service using your documentation.

We will choose the initial pipeline and success measures together based on customer needs and the existing system.

Founding Engineer, Data & AI

The role

Founding Engineer, Data & AI

The role

What you will do

What you'll own

Your first 90 days

What you need

Problems you might tackle

Our stack

About Pennant

Similar jobs at other companies

Data Engineer (Founding Team)

Founding AI Engineer

Staff Software Engineer, Data

Founding AI Engineer - Manhattan Labs

Staff Data Engineer

Staff Data Engineer

Pennant

Compared with similar jobs