Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA, United States / Remote

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: $100K - $200K

Equity: 0.25% - 1.00%

Experience: 1+ years

Visa: Will sponsor

About Runtime

Runtime (runtm.com) is the agent harness that payment companies, banks, and lenders use to run their operations with leaner teams. Their ops teams build agents that trace stuck payments, work fraud and compliance alerts, clear reconciliation breaks, and investigate escalations across support tools, codebases, and logs. We work with fast-growing fintech unicorns and payments companies that move hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Their teams use Runtime every day, and it's already mission-critical infrastructure for them.

The team

We're AI engineers who've built payment and AI infrastructure at Fortune 500 scale, so we know the work our customers' underwriting, risk, and compliance teams do every day.

Gus Trigos, co-founder and CEO. AI engineer and second-time YC founder. Former quant in BlackRock's AI Quantitative Investment Group. Built Mentum (YC S21, acquired last year) for Latin America's largest asset and wealth managers, handling $20B+ in AUM data and 120k transactions a month.

Carlos Volante, co-founder and CTO. Scaled underwriting and payment reconciliation infrastructure at Modern Treasury, Finix, and Hulu's payments team (Disney), covering billions in volume, near-perfect uptime, and billing for tens of millions of users.

About the role

You'll join Carlos, Gus, and our founding engineers in San Francisco as one of our first hires. You'll work directly with the ops, risk, and compliance teams at our customers, figure out which of their workflows agents should own, and build those agents with them. Because our customers run real money through these workflows, you'll care as much about reliability, access controls, and audit trails as you do about speed.

What you'll do

  • Embed with customer teams to map workflows like payment investigations, underwriting, reconciliation, and fraud reviews, then build and deploy agents that run them

  • Connect Runtime to customer systems, including processors, ledgers, banks, support tools, and data warehouses

  • Train customer teams to build and run their own agents, so Runtime keeps working long after you've moved on

  • Bring what you learn back into the product, from new integrations to better harnesses and guardrails

  • Shape how we sell, deploy, and support customers alongside the founding team

What we're looking for

  • Experience at a fintech, payments company, bank, or other financial institution, ideally close to payment flows, reconciliation, risk, or compliance

  • Strong product and engineering background building production systems, with hands-on work on LLM agents and daily use of coding agents

  • Comfort in front of customers, from an ops analyst to a COO and CFO, and turning a messy ops problem into a clean technical plan

  • Comfort with ambiguity and moving fast on a small team

Summary

Build and deploy AI agents for payment, underwriting, reconciliation, and fraud workflows with customer teams, connecting Runtime to processors, ledgers, banks, support tools, and data warehouses. Requires fintech/payments/banking experience, production systems engineering, hands-on LLM and coding-agent work, customer-facing comfort, and comfort with ambiguity on a small team.

Responsibilities

Embed with customer teams to map workflows and build/deploy agents; connect Runtime to customer systems; train customer teams to build and run agents; bring learnings into product; shape sales, deployment, and customer support

Qualifications

Experience at a fintech, payments company, bank, or financial institution near payment flows, reconciliation, risk, or compliance; strong product/engineering background building production systems; hands-on LLM agents and daily coding agents; customer-facing comfort; comfort with ambiguity on a small team

Experience requirements

1+ years

Benefits

Equity 0.25% - 1.00%; visa sponsorship