Founding AI Engineer
About Keycard
Keycard is on a mission to redefine machine identity for the AI Era—empowering developers to seamlessly connect people, agents, and services across networks, clouds, and applications. As generative AI and agent-based workflows grow more sophisticated, they demand real-time, adaptable access patterns. Keycard unlocks dynamic, identity-based credentials, ensuring every agent and service operates with precise, contextual permissions—creating a robust foundation for trusted AI systems.
We envision a global identity network, underpinned by open protocols, allowing distributed systems to adapt dynamically, scaling to handle complex AI workloads, and maintain cryptographically verifiable trust relationships. By rethinking secret management and machine identity from first principles, our goal is to delight developers, meet the performance demands of platform engineers, and establish new security primitives for cloud-native architectures—all in an inclusive, collaborative environment focused on consistent, high-quality execution and crafting products that developers love so much they bring them everywhere they go.
The Role
We're hiring a Founding AI Engineer to bring agents from the lab into production by developing the core systems that power our global identity network. This hands-on role comes with direct impact on Keycard's architecture, AI strategy, and the possibilities we unlock for agent builders. You'll collaborate closely with the founders and other early employees to move quickly and build the future of identity for AI systems.
What You'll Do
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Create the Future of Identity in AI: Take the lead on reinventing machine identity and access control for AI workloads. Build systems that empower developers to deploy autonomous agents with strong security guarantees.
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Push the Envelope of Generative AI: Integrate cutting-edge LLMs and conversational AI into developer products. Design real-time systems leveraging state-of-the-art prompt engineering and develop custom models and fine-tuning approaches for novel problems.
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Be Hands On: Take ownership of projects from ideation to production. Work across our full stack—infrastructure, core systems, and ecosystem. Build new systems and refine existing ones with a focus on excellence.
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Mentor, Learn & Grow: Share expertise in AI, distributed systems, and software craftsmanship through code reviews, design discussions, and pair programming. Foster a positive, learning-focused environment where everyone continues to grow.
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Shape Engineering Culture: Build an AI-Native engineering culture that values collaboration and iterative delivery. Lead by example in emphasizing technical excellence, recognizing that culture is what you do, not what you say.
What We're Looking For
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AI & Systems Experience: Proven track record developing, deploying, or integrating AI/ML models into production (LLMs, generative models, or domain-specific ML systems) with experience working with TypeScript, Python, and production systems.
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Ownership Mindset: Takes responsibility for company success, contributes through change and manages ambiguity, delivers consistently by balancing long-term vision with short-term needs, and thrives with autonomy and self-direction.
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Builder & Product-Minded: Hands-on engineer passionate about developer experience who balances coding with thoughtful system design to create functional, beautiful products developers love.
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Growing Systems Expertise: Significant experience building distributed systems with focus on resilient, high-availability architectures and pragmatic technology choices.
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Curious & Growth-Oriented: Continuously learning and challenging assumptions, stays ahead of AI industry trends, and brings others along in technical growth.
Strong Candidates May Also Have
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Experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Hugging Face Transformers for production AI systems
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Background in prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or custom model training for real-world applications, especially in chat or conversational AI contexts
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Experience building end-to-end machine learning pipelines using Kubeflow, MLflow, or Airflow for data ingestion and production monitoring
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Strong understanding of feature engineering, model versioning, and strategies for real-time inference
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Practical experience creating chatbot interfaces, conversation flows, and advanced NLP/NLU systems for real-time interactions
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Knowledge of secure model deployment strategies to prevent data breaches, model poisoning, and identity spoofing
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Experience with scaled developer tools and high-availability infrastructure systems
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Active participation in AI Engineering communities through code contributions or tool development
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Experience with edge computing and optimizing models for low-latency or resource-constrained environments
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Track record of open source contributions with understanding of open/closed source tradeoffs
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Demonstrated experience building AI tools and agents using LLMs
What We Offer
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Competitive Compensation & Equity: Market-competitive salaries with generous equity packages for early employees, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff.
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Comprehensive Benefits: Competitive health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, so you can focus on building and staying healthy.
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Flexible, Remote-First Work: As a remote-first company, we prioritize asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. We want to hire the best.
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Time Off to Recharge: We offer 4 weeks of vacation, 11 statutory holidays, 1 volunteer day, and parental leave. We encourage at least 2 weeks off annually to recharge so you can show up and push forward every day.
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Autonomy & Impact: Join our founding team and shape not only our technology but also what we build and how we build it. You'll be empowered to make meaningful decisions, grow in your craft, and lead at the forefront of the AI infrastructure that is transforming the future of work.
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Top-of-the-Line Equipment: A new MacBook Pro plus a $500 stipend for peripherals (headphones, mic, camera) so you can collaborate at your best.
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Access to the latest AI tools: The way developers build software is evolving. To lead this transition and stay at the forefront of agent-driven workflows, you need the most powerful developer capabilities available.
Why Join Us?
Core Mission
Keycard is driving a fundamental shift in AI infrastructure: enabling trusted, autonomous agents through dynamic, identity-driven access controls. This is a rare opportunity to help define how AI systems interact and operate in production environments.
Technical Impact
You'll help invent and shape the critical infrastructure that enables widespread adoption of AI in production use cases, reinventing how developers build and deploy autonomous systems while ensuring they remain secure and trustworthy.
Culture & Team
By joining as an early employee, you'll have the opportunity to help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined AI development, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact. You'll collaborate with founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Okta, Auth0, Signal Sciences, Heroku, Kraken, and Salesforce.
If you're energized by the intersection of AI systems and distributed infrastructure and want to advance both developer productivity and AI security, with a hunger to learn & have an impact, we'd love to explore how you can help us shape the future of software.
Application Process
Time Zone Compatibility
Please include in your application:
- → Your resume
- → Your socials
- → Links to your best [post, talk, code, etc.]
And answer these questions:
- 1. Share a time when you changed your mind about a strongly held belief
- 2. What's the latest skill you taught yourself, and how?
- 3. Tell us about impactful feedback you've received and how it changed you