AI Engineer, Risely Platform
Risely is building the agentic operating system for universities. We're live at some of the largest universities in the country and building fast.
We're hiring an AI Engineer to build Risely's Command Center: the internal operating system that runs the company, and the foundation its agents stand on. The Command Center's agents take on Risely's own operational work, and too much of that early automation was built as separate systems. Your job is to decide what belongs in a shared foundation, build it, and use it to ship the agents the company needs. You start from operating problems that are still vague and carry them to something a person can trust. This is a founding role with its own engineering track.
What you'll own
- The shared foundation. One common approach to context, approvals, retries, permissions, evidence, and monitoring, so the next agent is far cheaper to build than the last. You decide what belongs in the foundation and what stays inside a single agent.
- Evidence and human authority. Every claim an agent makes is traced to the source that supports it. When a person corrects an agent, that correction stays authoritative on every later run.
- Consequential actions. Publishing, sending, and writing to a system of record are approved, executed exactly once, and traceable afterward. When an agent has too much authority, a person can take it back.
- Failure and degradation. Runs stall, receive duplicate events, retry, and sometimes finish while quietly producing worse work than the last time. You make that behavior deliberate and safe to resume.
- The agents themselves. You ship the agents the company needs end to end. One runs the sales pipeline, from prospect research to outbound to deal follow-up. One turns a university's public catalog into a working demo and drafts the email that carries it. One watches customer health and flags risk early. You take each from the product decision through architecture, implementation, deployment, and the experience of the person operating it.
Who you are
Who you are:
- AI-native. You orchestrate coding agents to multiply yourself. You ship more in a week as a one-person team than most companies ship in a month with five, and you have a real point of view on where an agent adds leverage and where a human still has to drive.
- Systems thinker. You model a messy domain into something an agent can act on, and you see the dependencies across the systems you own before you change any of them.
- A shipper. You turn a manual process into a working agent this week, watch it run, and harden it the next. You close loops fast, and you measure whether the agent actually helped.
- Judgment about authority. You have a clear point of view on where an agent should act on its own, where a human has to approve first, and how to take authority back when an agent is uncertain or wrong.
- Owner. You take an internal problem from its first vague shape to an agent running in production, and you own the result. This is a real engineering track, not a side desk.
3-8 years of production engineering. You've shipped real software, and ideally you've built with LLMs and agents already.
Experience
- LLMs and agents. You've built with leading foundation model APIs, designed evaluation for non-deterministic systems, and shipped agent products to production. You have a working point of view on what an agent should own and where a human stays in the loop.
- Backend and data. TypeScript and Python in production. You model data well, and you're comfortable with retrieval and search over a real body of knowledge.
- Systems that run unattended. Queues, schedulers, workers, observability. You've built background systems that run on their own, and you know how to tell when one quietly breaks.
- Integrations. You've wired software together through real APIs and lived with the edge cases, so an agent can work inside the tools a company already uses.
About Risely
Risely is the agentic operating system for higher education. We put the whole institution on one record and give every office an agent that does the real work, with staff approving every move. We're live at some of the largest universities in the country and growing fast.
Higher education is at a hinge. Colleges are under real pressure, the people inside them are stretched past what any team can carry, and the technology to change that has only just arrived. We are building for that moment, and we intend to define it.
We're a small team, YC-backed and well-funded, and we are all in. The pace is high and the work is hard. The equity and the impact are both founder-grade.
Compensation
$120-140K plus founding-level equity.
Apply for AI Engineer, Risely Platform
Risely is unable to sponsor work visas at this time. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.
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