Founding AI Engineer

← All roles Founding AI Engineer Full-time·Montreal (Hybrid) Kouvre is the AI agent for restaurants. Independent owners text it like an employee and it runs the business: promos, menus, prices, reviews, their website, all across UberEats, DoorDash, and Skip at once. No dashboards. We're already making restaurants money. One BOGO at a Montreal spot, launched by a single text, lifted UberEats revenue by 1,000% on a slow Tuesday. As our Founding AI Engineer, you own the brain. You will partner closely with the Founding CTO to turn a plain-text message into the right action, building the reasoning, the agents, and the evals that make Kouvre feel less like software and more like a sharp employee who never drops the ball. The Mission For the owner: Make Kouvre understand intent. When an owner texts "fill my slow Tuesday," Kouvre has to know what that means and do the right thing: the promo, the platform, the timing, without a brief. For the company: Make the agent trustworthy. The gap between a fun demo and a business owners depend on is everything you'll build: reliability, judgment, and knowing what not to do. What You'll Build The reasoning layer: The agent logic that maps a casual text to the correct, complete action across platforms, handling ambiguity the way a good employee would. The action agents: Generative agents that draft promo copy, build a campaign, reply to a review in the restaurant's voice, or turn a new dish into a social post. The eval pipeline: The harness that proves a change made the agent better, not just different. Your safeguard against shipping regressions into someone's livelihood. The judgment guardrails: Knowing when to act, when to confirm, and when to stay quiet. A 10/10 action or nothing. The continuous edge: Feedback loops that make the agent sharper with every restaurant it runs. What We're Looking For Deep agent intuition: You've built real LLM systems (tool-use, orchestration, retrieval, evals) and you know their failure modes cold. Product instinct: You care about the owner's outcome, not model benchmarks. You think "did it do the right thing," not "was the output plausible." Ship-it capability: You take an idea from notebook to production and own the path to real users. Scrappy with ambiguity: Small datasets, messy real-world signals, and fuzzy goals energize you. Clear thinking: You can explain a precision, latency, and cost trade-off plainly and make the call. Why This is Different AI is the product. You're building the thing the company is, not a feature on a dashboard. Founding equity, and the rare chance to define an AI discipline from scratch, with a CTO who backs you. Live proof it works. An operator-led company that's already making restaurants money. Zero bureaucracy. Proof of work over process. The best agent is one an owner forgets is software. Montreal-based and hybrid. Work from home, and meet in person when it matters. How to Apply Skip the resume and cover letter. We value proof of work over credentials. Show us something hard you've built and shipped, and the hunger to outbuild everyone else.

Develop the reasoning layer and action agents that translate plain-text messages into business actions across food delivery platforms. Build the evaluation pipeline and judgment guardrails to ensure the AI agent is reliable and trustworthy for restaurant owners.

Seeking an engineer with deep intuition for LLM systems, tool-use, and orchestration who can move projects from notebook to production. Candidates must possess strong product instincts and the ability to handle ambiguity in real-world data environments.

• Founding Equity

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• LLM Systems
• Agent Orchestration
• Tool-use
• Retrieval
• Evaluation Pipelines
• Product Instinct
• Reasoning Layer Design
• Prompt Engineering
• Generative AI
• System Architecture

• Software
• Technology
• Engineering
• Data & Analytics
• Food & Beverage

Minimum experience

5+ years

Apply by

Sep 3, 2026

Posting language

English

Working hours

40 hours per week

Seniority

Mid-Senior level