Founding Engineer - US

Cozmo is building AI employees, fully multimodal agents that see, speak, think, and do, starting with financial services and insurances. We’re redefining how banks and insurers operate by deploying AI agents that handle complex, regulated workflows with human-level reasoning and communication.

Our platform powers autonomous, voice-driven AI agents capable of real-time customer conversations, operational execution, and decision-making across claims, underwriting, onboarding, and collections. Cozmo is backed by top US investors and is scaling fast toward our mission: creating an AI workforce that works as naturally as humans do.

The Role
We’re looking for a Founding Engineer in the US to join our core team and help build the next generation of autonomous AI systems. This is not just a senior engineering role, it’s a builder’s seat at the founding table. You’ll ship product alongside the founders, design and own core technical systems, and shape our culture and code from the ground up.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and build real-time multimodal AI systems (voice, text, vision) with ultra-low latency performance.
• Work directly with the founders on product design, technical architecture, and scaling infrastructure across cloud and edge environments.
• Own end-to-end pipelines for speech, reasoning, and execution systems, from model integration to API orchestration.
• Collaborate with early enterprise customers (banks, insurers) to deploy and iterate Cozmo’s AI employee stack in production.
• Hire, mentor, and shape the next generation of builders as we scale the engineering team.

You’re a Great Fit If You:

• Have deep experience in building and shipping real products in AI, distributed systems, or real-time voice/video tech.
• Thrive in zero-to-one environments, bias to action, high ownership, and product intuition are your default settings.
• Are fluent in Python or Rust and comfortable with cloud-native (AWS/GCP), containerized, and pub/sub architectures.
• Have worked closely with LLMs or multimodal models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) and enjoy optimizing systems for speed and interactivity.
• Want to build something legendary, not just join a company.

Why This Role Rocks

• True founding equity, you’ll have meaningful ownership from day one.
• Work alongside world-class builders in AI, product, and finance.
• Opportunity to shape not just a product, but an entire category, AI employees in enterprise.
• Based in the US (join our team in SF or NYC).

At Cozmo, we believe the next iconic tech company will be defined by those who make AI work in the real world.

To apply, send a quick note and your GitHub

Our process is fast, founder-led, and focused on real work, not leetcode. We aim to go from first call to decision within 10 days for strong candidates.

Founder Intro (30–45 min)

Goal: Mutual fit check and high-level sell.

What we cover:

• Your story, what you’ve built, and how you think about ownership and risk.
• Cozmo’s mission (AI employees for financial services), current product, and what “founding engineer” really means here.
• High-level tech stack and problem space (real-time voice, agents, infra).

What we’re looking for:

• Founder-level motivation, bias to action, ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical people.

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Technical Deep Dive (60–75 min)

Goal: Understand how you build real systems.

Format:

• You walk us through 1–2 real projects you’ve led end-to-end (ideally production systems, AI/infra/real-time).
• We peel into architecture, tradeoffs, scaling, reliability, and how you debugged hard problems.

What we’re looking for:

• Strong architecture thinking, ability to reason from first principles, and pragmatism (shipping vs perfection).
• Experience with LLMs/agents, distributed systems, or real-time voice is a big plus.

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Live Build / Pairing Session (90–120 min)

Goal: See how we work together.

Format (collaborative, not adversarial):

• We pick a problem close to Cozmo’s world (e.g., a simplified voice/agent flow, a small service with streaming, or an infra piece).
• You and one of us design and implement a scrappy version together (whiteboard + code).

What we’re looking for:

• How you break down ambiguous problems, choose interfaces, and trade off speed vs quality.
• Your coding style, ownership, and how you communicate while building in real time.

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Founder / Culture + Vision Session (45–60 min)

Goal: Decide if we’d be excited to build a company together.

What we cover:

• How you think about startups, intensity, and what “being early” means.
• How you handle conflict, ambiguity, and big technical/product bets.
• Where you want your career and impact to go in the next 5–10 years.

What we’re looking for:

• “Hell yes” founder-fit: someone we’d trust with core architecture, customers, and future hires.