Founding Engineer - Product & Applied AI

Pennant is growing fast and opening our NYC office (IRL is a must for this role). Come pace the frontier with us for this unique opportunity to join a YC-backed company fresh off the summer batch, and report directly to the Co-Founder/CEO and have tangible impact on our company every single day.

Company Description

Pennant is building AI-native software for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting and shareholder/company engagement.

Institutional investors, public companies and their advisors make consequential decisions using information scattered across filings, policies, research and on the desk conversations. We bring that information together so teams can understand the evidence, apply their own judgment and preserve why they made a decision. We're bringing frontier AI capabilities to enterprise grade offerings used by trillion-dollar decision-makers across capital markets.

Our ambition is a world model for corporate governance: a system that connects institutional knowledge, policies, decisions and outcomes. Getting there starts with reliable data and software customers trust in their daily work.

Role Description

Founding Engineer – Product & Applied AI is an on-site position based in New York, NY. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO; works directly with both founders and domain experts. You’ll be part of the founding Pennant team to design, build, and ship the core AI features of the product. Build and own the data systems that make Pennant useful and trustworthy.

Own a customer workflow from understanding the problem through repeated production use.

This is a full-stack engineering role with product judgment and customer ownership. You will build on an existing application, connecting interfaces, backend APIs, persistent state and integrations into complete workflows. You should be comfortable tracing a user action from the browser to the database—and owning what happens when only part of that sequence succeeds. You will work directly with customers to observe how they work, challenge assumptions, prototype interactions and follow up after release.

As one of our first engineering hires, you will have a substantial say in the product and how we build it. Your responsibility includes onboarding and production support, not just shipping the first version.

How We Work

We work in person in New York and stay close to customers across the country on-site. We prototype quickly, use AI development tools where they help, and remain responsible for what we ship.

We narrow scope before compromising correctness, permissions or customer trust. We test representative cases and failure paths, observe what happens after release, and flag risks early. Founding engineers have room to make decisions and are expected to make their reasoning understandable to the team.

Qualifications

• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals across modern component-based web applications, typed languages, backend APIs, relational databases and data modeling
• Product and interaction judgment. You can make a complex workflow understandable, notice consequential details and use a prototype to test an assumption before overbuilding
• Experience owning software used by real customers, including releases, onboarding, production debugging and improvements after launch
• Sound judgment about database transactions, durable application state, permissions and integrations. Experience testing complete user journeys and failure recovery, not only isolated components
• The ability to talk directly with customers, distinguish the underlying need from the requested feature, and explain technical tradeoffs without hiding behind jargon
• Practical familiarity with LLM-powered products and a willingness to evaluate their usefulness and failure modes. Deep experience shipping complex, data-intensive products can outweigh a long list of AI projects
• Experience with financial products, document viewers, approval workflows, browser testing or early-stage companies is useful. We will teach the governance domain. We care more about what you have made work for customers than which framework you used