Founding AI Engineer - Manhattan Labs at Pear Vc

About the team We’re building the AI-native compliance platform for community banks and financial institutions. Regulatory pressure is intensifying. Financial crime is becoming more sophisticated. Compliance teams are overwhelmed by manual workflows and fragmented systems. Community banks, despite managing billions in assets, lack the tooling to keep up. We’re building the intelligence layer that changes that: a system that can answer questions like “What is our exposure to this entity across all customers?” - with a defensible, auditable answer. Our team includes engineers and researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and IIT Madras, and we’re backed by Tier 1 investors and experienced operators who understand the massive opportunity in modernizing financial crime compliance with AI. Learn more at [Upgrade to PRO to see link] . Description of the role This is a true founding engineer role. You won’t just ship features - you’ll define the system. You’ll architect and build an AI-native platform that operates as the investigative brain for compliance teams. This includes agentic reasoning systems, large-scale document ingestion, and user-facing tools that must stand up to regulatory scrutiny. You will take the product from early-stage MVP to a secure, reliable, enterprise-grade system used by financial institutions. By reimagining KYB and AML as autonomous intelligence, you'll help build the platform that becomes the default compliance infrastructure for thousands of community banks, that each manage assets worth billions of dollars. You'll work directly with the founding team, own technical decisions, and lay the foundation for a potentially massive and fast-growing SaaS company. Responsibilities and potential impact - 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 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 What we offer We believe in generous, top-tier compensation and benefits for our employees: - Competitive salary and equity - 100% health, dental, and vision coverage - Commuter stipend - Regular team events and off-sites