Founding Engineer

New York, NY (on-site/hybrid; travel within NYC required for client deployments)

About Sellara

Sellara is an applied AI lab building the intelligence layer for financial institutions. We turn messy, human-driven operational workflows (ex. chat, email, internal comms) into structured, system-ready outputs. Our clients run operations across dozens of disconnected systems; Sellara sits between them by automating their compliance-grade workflows without sacrificing accuracy or auditability.

We're backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Nomad Ventures, and are an official OpenAI partner.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you'll build the integrations and tooling that get Sellara running inside client environments — then go on-site to deploy them yourself. This is primarily an engineering role where you're writing code against client systems. UX/UI work comes up, but it's secondary to engineering.

You'd be shaping how Sellara deploys, not just executing an existing playbook. You'll have autonomy and direct exposure to how AI gets adopted inside real financial institutions, where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in millions of dollars and regulatory exposure.

What You'll Do

• Build integrations against client source systems (OMS/EMS, internal messaging, core banking systems), with validation and error-handling that meet institutional reliability standards
• Travel on-site to deploy Sellara at client institutions (configuration, testing, and go-live support)
• Build and extend AI/agentic workflows on top of the core platform
• Contribute directly to the core platform where deployment work surfaces gaps in the product
• Run discovery with clients, translating operational workflows (reconciliation, exception handling, trade support, compliance reporting) into implementable specs
• Support sales during pre-sale technical evaluation
• Build lightweight UX/UI for workflow interfaces when needed

What We're Looking For

• 4–5+ years as a software engineer, with direct experience shipping and owning production systems end to end
• Proficient in our stack: Python, SQL, TypeScript/JavaScript, React, Next.js; comfortable with AWS or GCP
• Real experience building with AI/LLMs — not just calling an API, but building agentic workflow logic; you'll be doing more of this over time, not less
• Comfortable being client-facing: you can hold your own in a technical discovery call or demo and explain tradeoffs to non-engineers
• Willingness to travel for on-site deployments
• Based in or willing to relocate to NYC immediately
• Founding-stage mentality and autonomy — you will not be told what to do more often than not

Nice to Have

• Fluency with financial operations workflows and terminology
• UX/UI instincts — able to design a usable workflow interface
• Experience at an early-stage startup in a founding or near-founding role
• Prior experience at a broker-dealer, asset manager, hedge fund, or bank capital markets desk

About Sellara

Sellara is an AI agent that automates critical workflows for financial institutions. They offer deployable AI agents for every financial institution, with features such as powerful automation, simple experience, and work with their forward-deployed team to put their agents onto your desks. They integrate with outlook, bloomberg, etc.