Come build the thing that doesn't exist yet.

The vibe

You love the 0→1 phase. You crave the blank database, the first scraper against a stubborn government portal, and the MVP that ships in three days. You build natively with AI and want to be as close to the customer as possible.

• Some days you'll be deep in messy data structuring.
• Some days you'll stand up an entirely new product vertical.
• Some days you'll rebuild the website simply because it needs doing.

You do whatever it takes to help the company win. If that makes you lean in, keep reading.

What you'll own

• The Engine: Build scrapers and pipelines to extract data from hostile, unstructured sources — locked PDFs, government portals, legal databases.
• The Architecture: Design a global, multi-country Postgres schema from Day 1. Get it right and everything downstream scales; get it wrong and we all feel it.
• The AI Plumbing: Connect raw data to our LLM reasoning layer to reliably capture structured, trustworthy output.
• The Infrastructure: Own the deployment (AWS/GCP) and keep things running. If it breaks, you fix it.
• Product Velocity: Use AI-assisted development to ship internal tools and MVPs at a speed that feels unfair.

Who you are

• A Builder (4+ years): You've built APIs and systems from scratch. Legacy maintenance isn't your thing. (Plus points for previous founders / employees 1–5.)
• Pragmatic Full-Stack: You live in the backend but aren't allergic to React frontends. You use AI to bridge skill gaps and ship whole products.
• You know your LLMs: Experience integrating data pipelines with LLM-based or AI reasoning layers, and using AI-assisted development to accelerate delivery.
• Data & Quality Obsessed: You know AI is useless without pristine data. Deep web scraping experience and a high bar for correctness — wrong data in regulated products has real-world consequences.
• Founding DNA: Priorities shift rapidly; you adapt without missing a beat.

How to apply

The founders read every application. In exchange, skip the résumé theater and show us how you actually build. Send an email to karina@kensai.ai with the exact subject line:

Kensai | Founding engineer

Applications without this subject line won't be read. Include these three things:

1. Proof you build. A repo, a shipped product, a scraper, or a schema you're proud of. Add one sentence on why it was hard, plus your LinkedIn profile.
2. A 20-minute take. Take Product A or Product B and sketch how you'd build a SKU-level intelligence dashboard for it (tracking claims, ingredients, sourcing, attributes). We don't want polished code. Send a schema architecture, or a Loom walking through your approach. We want to see your product instincts.
3. One sharp question. The question you need answered before betting the next few years of your life on us. Skip Claude, we want to know what you are interested in.

The idea

We don't have this role written into a job spec yet. If our mission genuinely excites you, and you can see exactly where you'd create value here, let's meet.

Maybe you're a GTM operator, a regulatory wizard, or something we haven't thought of. Show us how you'd move the mission forward.

How to apply

Don't send a résumé. Share with us what you'd actually do. Email karina@kensai.ai with the subject line:

Kensai | The mission

Why this mission, what you'd own, and one concrete thing you'd build or fix in your first month. Add a link to something you've made and your LinkedIn.