Founding AI Engineer - Manhattan Labs

Summary

Pear VC is building an AI-native compliance platform for community banks and financial institutions. The Founding AI Engineer will architect and build a platform that serves as the investigative brain for compliance teams, focusing on developing scalable backend services and AI systems to modernize financial crime compliance.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate RAG and agentic systems over complex financial data (corporate registries, sanctions lists, beneficial ownership, adverse media), with clear evaluation metrics for accuracy, latency, and cost
• Develop scalable backend services for document processing (PDF/OCR/CSV), async job queues, case lifecycle orchestration, and risk scoring with confidence-driven UX and human-in-the-loop controls
• Own the productionization of AI systems, including evaluation pipelines, dataset/version management, and safe rollout strategies (A/B testing, guardrails, fallback behavior)
• Harden the platform for enterprise: auth controls, role-based access, audit trails, backups, and monitoring with measurable SLOs
• Establish CI/CD, deployment pipelines, runbooks, and incident response practices from the ground up
• Propose and engage in cutting-edge AI research related to our mission, particularly around agentic reasoning over regulatory and financial data
• Work directly with the founding team to define architecture, technical roadmap, and product direction

Skills

• 1+ years of experience on technical projects with startup experience strongly preferred
• Strong TypeScript and Python skills across modern frontend and backend stacks
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM integrations or RAG systems into production user-facing products
• Experience with document processing, entity extraction, and structured data extraction from messy real-world sources
• Solid grasp of API design, relational databases, and async job processing systems
• Proven track record taking a product from 'works locally' to reliable production at growing scale
• Debugging instincts across frontend, backend, infra, and data boundaries - and an ownership mindset to match
• Knowledge of KYC/KYB/AML workflows, sanctions screening, beneficial ownership data, or regulated fintech
• Experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar AI orchestration frameworks
• Familiarity with banking APIs, core banking systems, or financial data providers
• Familiarity with OCR and document intelligence pipelines
• Background in fintech, compliance, RegTech, or other regulated industries
• Cloud deployment experience and DevOps knowledge in security-sensitive environments
• Strong product intuition and user experience focus

Qualifications

Must Haves

• 1+ years of experience on technical projects with startup experience strongly preferred
• Strong TypeScript and Python skills across modern frontend and backend stacks
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM integrations or RAG systems into production user-facing products
• Experience with document processing, entity extraction, and structured data extraction from messy real-world sources
• Solid grasp of API design, relational databases, and async job processing systems
• Proven track record taking a product from 'works locally' to reliable production at growing scale
• Debugging instincts across frontend, backend, infra, and data boundaries - and an ownership mindset to match

Nice to Haves

• Knowledge of KYC/KYB/AML workflows, sanctions screening, beneficial ownership data, or regulated fintech
• Experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar AI orchestration frameworks
• Familiarity with banking APIs, core banking systems, or financial data providers
• Familiarity with OCR and document intelligence pipelines
• Background in fintech, compliance, RegTech, or other regulated industries
• Cloud deployment experience and DevOps knowledge in security-sensitive environments
• Strong product intuition and user experience focus

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• 100% health, dental, and vision coverage
• Commuter stipend
• Regular team events and off-sites