Founding Engineer

  • New York City
  • In person
  • $140,000 - $180,000 + equity

Build the systems that verify, underwrite and collect the invoices behind $7 trillion of American receivables.

ApplyWhy we’re building this

About Iridium

Every small and big business in America has invoices sitting unpaid. $7 trillion of them. A business can take an unpaid invoice to a lender, get most of its value in cash now, and the lender collects later when it’s eventually paid. It’s how small businesses bridge the gap between doing the work and getting paid. In countries around the world, more than 10% of GDP runs through this kind of financing. In the US, less than 2%.

It’s stuck because a lender can’t just hand over cash for all $7 trillion of invoices with no proof, they have to verify each invoice is genuine, the work was actually done, and judge whether it will be paid. Today that’s done by people, manually, on only the largest and easiest invoices. And fraud is rampant - BlackRock lost $430M to invoices that were completely fabricated. The software to automate this at scale doesn’t exist yet.

That’s what Iridium is building. Live with US lenders today, backed by strategic institutional investors.

The role

You would work directly with Preesha, our CTO, on an engineering team where you’ll be given high responsibility. You own systems end to end, and you own the lenders who use them - onboarding, expansion, and the calls where you find out which of your assumptions survive a credit team. There is no layer between engineering and the customer here, and this is an opportunity to have full ownership over what you build

The work is unforgiving in a specific way: a verification that is wrong is money gone.

Anthony, our CEO, co-built Morgan Stanley’s payments platform and automated credit underwriting for banks and PE desks. Preesha, our CTO, built the recommendation models in Bloomberg’s terminal and has published twice on causality in financial data at tier-1 conferences.

Your first 90 days

  • Month one. In production in week one. You own one of the systems above.

  • Month two. You are on lender calls, and you can take a verification failure from report to root cause to fix without help.

  • Month three. You own a system end to end - including what it costs to run and what happens when it breaks at 2am.

What you will build

  • Knowledge ingestion engine. A huge portion of your work will be building the engine that makes verification possible at scale. Every signal - blurry receipts, Excel sheets, portal data retrieved by browser agents, payment histories, fraud indicators - has to be ingested, normalised, and synthesised into a single coherent picture of whether an invoice is real and whether it will be paid. This is the foundation everything else runs on.

  • Portal agents. Building a general, self adapting browser agent, that can navigate across over 1500 portals to pull the approvals a verification depends on. Through 2FA, constantly adapting portal UI and at the scale of verifying 10s of thousands of invoices at once.

  • Risk engine. A living view of the lending book that updates on every invoice funded and every payment received, instead of a credit decision frozen at origination. Greenfield.

  • Voice collections. You will build the voice layer that collects on invoices the way a great human collector would. Not automated reminders. A voice agent that knows the history of the debtor relationship, understands the right moment to call, and has the judgment to adapt the conversation in real time.

  • Evaluation. Extending our eval suite. Nothing ships on vibes, and this is why our customers trust us as the best-in-class.

Stack

Backend
Python
Frontend
TypeScript, React, Next.js
Infrastructure
AWS, Terraform, Docker
Skills
Distributed & scalable system design, building production grade AI agents and evaluation pipelines, search & retrieval systems, time series models / analysis.

You are not expected to have shipped all of this. You are expected to be dangerous in most of it within a month.

Who this is for

You might be a fit if

  • You have taken something from zero to production and owned it after it shipped.

  • You have experience in any of these areas, and understand the challenges building the following would involve:

    • Zero to one in finance or another heavily regulated industry
    • Voice AI over real telephony, on a genuinely hard problem, e.g. navigating dialpads, being transferred on call, and handling transferring to the lender themselves with context.
    • Agentic systems that do more than let an LLM answer questions over a pile of documents

  • You have worked at a startup and know how important to the company, a founding engineer is. You know what a cliff is.

  • Strong computer science fundamentals. We index heavily on what you’ve built.

Nice to haves

  • Python and TypeScript across the stack
  • Evaluation-driven development for LLM systems
  • Experience building for the financial services.

Not a fit if

  • You want to stay away from a forward-deployed role - you will be on lender calls.
  • An intense, in-person work environment is not the season of life you are in. We are early, the market is $7 trillion, and the speed we are moving at is why we work so intensely.
  • You want a defined scope. Most of what you build here has no precedent.

Compensation and process

Salary
$140,000 - $180,000 USD base, depending on experience
Equity
Meaningful founding-engineer equity. Real numbers on the first call.
Location
New York City, in person
Work authorisation
You must already be authorised to work in the US. We can take on an H-1B transfer.
Reports to
Preesha Gehlot, CTO

The interview process

Apply and we reply within 24 hours.

  1. Screening call
  2. Paid work trial
  3. Interview with Anthony, our CEO
  4. Offer

One to two weeks start to finish.

Apply

Tell us who you are and what you’ve been building. We read every application and reply within 24 hours.

Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?
Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status?

We read every application.

Iridium is an equal opportunity employer. We consider every qualified applicant without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status. If you need an accommodation at any point in the process, tell us in your application and we will arrange it.

$140,000 - $180,000 + equityApply