As the Founding Engineer at Cortex, you will own the end-to-end ML and reinforcement learning stack. You’ll build proprietary AI systems that transform electrical engineering knowledge into automated design tools. This high-ownership role involves designing models, training pipelines, and evaluation infrastructure that will fundamentally define how hardware is created from concept to production.
Founding Engineer at Cortex
As a Founding Engineer in NYC, you'll own the ML/RL stack end-to-end, moving beyond simple implementation to architect systems that automate PCB design. Working directly with HBS-trained founders, you’ll turn expert engineering knowledge into proprietary AI that transforms a multi-billion-dollar industry. If you have deep experience in reinforcement learning and building eval infrastructure from scratch, this is your chance to define the core technology of a high-growth startup.
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Location
New York, United States
Compensation
Not Disclosed
Company
Cortex
Role overview
Cortex is building the world’s best hardware engineer. We acquire and partner with specialized engineering firms, combining decades of hard-won engineering judgment with proprietary AI models. By learning from real design decisions, constraints, failures, and tradeoffs, our systems help take physical products from concept to production dramatically faster. Our goal is to make hardware development move at the speed of software.
What you will do
- Design and implement the core ML and reinforcement learning stack, including model architectures and scalable training pipelines.
- Build comprehensive evaluation infrastructure, encompassing reward shaping, benchmark design, and simulation environments for hardware design.
- Collaborate with electrical engineering firms to translate expert design knowledge into proprietary AI systems and feedback loops.
Who this is a fit for
- Extensive experience building and training machine learning and reinforcement learning systems from scratch in a production environment.
- Strong background in evaluation infrastructure, such as reward shaping, model evaluation tooling, or physics-based simulation environments.
- Proactive problem-solver comfortable with seed-stage ambiguity and a genuine interest in the intersection of AI and hardware engineering.
Why this role is remarkable
- Join a seed-stage team with $11.5M in funding from tier-1 investors and visionary founders from Harvard Business School.
- Tackle a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry by building AI that automates the core bottlenecks of physical hardware and PCB design.
- Direct impact as a founding member, shaping the technical architecture and company culture from the ground up alongside the founders.
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