FoundingAIEngineer

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 https://manhattanlabs.co/ . 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 servic