Founding Full-Stack AI Engineer

Propel Labs is the research and development arm of Creative Design Group, building AI-native learning and development products for small and medium-sized businesses. The Founding Full-Stack AI Engineer will be the first engineering hire, owning architecture and end-to-end development across AI pipelines, SaaS and mobile applications, data, infrastructure, security, and deployment.

Responsibilities:

• You are the first engineering hire. You will write the majority of the code, make most of the architecture calls, and own the product end to end: data model, backend, AI pipeline, web app, mobile app, and deploys
• You will work directly with the Director of Product & AI Strategy on scope and priorities, and with our instructional design and creative teams on product functionality and features
• The AI layer: Generation and synthesis pipelines built on frontier models, retrieval over customer-supplied documents, and the evaluation harness that keeps output quality from regressing every time we change a prompt. This is applied LLM engineering. We build on foundation models; we do not train them
• The product surface: A multi-tenant SaaS web application plus a mobile app, along with internal authoring tools and customer-facing admin and reporting views
• The platform underneath: Data model and tenant isolation, authentication and role-based access, background job processing for long-running generation work, usage metering (AI costs scale with usage, so this matters commercially), billing, and CI/CD
• Ingestion: Document parsing across PDF, DOCX, and slides, plus web research to enrich generated output. Both pull in untrusted content, so both need to be handled defensively
• Month 1: Get deep in the existing codebase and product. Deliver an honest technical assessment: what to keep, what to rebuild, what will break at scale
• Months 2-3: Own and ship a significant feature end to end. Establish the evaluation harness for AI output quality
• Months 4-6: Harden the platform for real customers. Multi-tenant security, usage metering, monitoring, and a deploy process you trust on a Friday