Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer (Research ↔ Forward Deployed): Stealth AI Security LabA Cherry Ventures portfolio companyAt Cherry, we back founders from pre-seed through Series B, and we spend a lot of time with our teams while the company is still being built. This is one of those teams. They're an applied AI lab, still in stealth, building defensive cybersecurity for enterprises and governments. They're backed by Cherry, Sequoia and Evantic alongside angels who run some of the world's best technology companies.The product is moving fast, enterprise traction is real, and the team is growing. They're now hiring Founding Engineers to build the first version of the product and the organisation, then scale both as the company works towards becoming a generational security company.A true founding roleThis isn't a "founding" title on a late hire. You'll be among the very first engineers, and the work is wide open: core product, infrastructure, research bets and customer deployments. You'll work directly with the founders, see the investors and enterprise and government customers up close, and help make the decisions that shape the company.The roleThis role sits between research engineering and forward-deployed engineering. You'll take frontier models and turn them into systems that hold up inside real enterprise security environments, and you'll work closely with the customers who depend on them.What you'll doJoin the first cohort of technical hires and ship the early product at paceLead early infrastructure and architecture decisions, trading off speed against what has to scaleWork directly with design partners and early customers, often on-site, turning what they need into productMove between research and deployment: test new model capabilities, then get them working in productionHelp set how the company builds, hires and works, as one of its founding culture carriersWhat we're looking forA track record of performing at an elite level in a competitive technical environmentExceptional academics in a quantitative discipline from a top universityTime in venture-backed startups, or your own entrepreneurial experienceHunger and humility in equal measure, plus the drive to learn fast and build something specialDeep expertise in applied ML. Strength in infrastructure or security is a plus but not requiredWhy nowStill in stealth, so you're joining before the world knows the name. Well enough funded, by investors who've done this before, that you can build properly from day one. There's more work than people to do it, and you'll get exposure most engineers only reach years into their careers. If you want founder-level ownership without starting from zero, this is it.The company name is shared after an intro conversation with the Cherry team.