The Mission We turn the chaos of health and wellness regulation (e.g. claims, ingredients, studies, certifications) into actionable data for the world's largest brands and retailers to map products, sell in retail/e-commerce, stay findable for AI-search, and stay compliant. We need someone extraordinary to build it, from demo to MVP. The Vibe You love 0→1. You crave the blank database, the first agent that reliably extracts truth from a stubborn government PDF, and the MVP that ships in three days. You build natively with AI and stay close to the customer. Some days you're deep in messy data; some days you're standing up a new vertical; some days you're rebuilding the website because it needs doing. Whatever it takes to win. What You'll Own - The Reasoning Layer (core): orchestrate the agentic system that turns raw, unstructured sources into structured, trustworthy, source-traceable output. - The Knowledge Base: own chunking, embeddings, retrieval, and evaluation. - The Engine: scrapers and pipelines against hostile sources (locked PDFs, government portals, legal databases). - The Architecture & Infra: a global multi-country Postgres schema from Day 1, and the deployment (AWS/GCP). If it breaks, you fix it. Who You Are - Agentic builder (core): hands-on with an orchestration framework (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex) on a major model (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google). You've shipped agents that retrieve, call tools, and reason. - Python-first, fluent and hands-on. - Database management: Postgres (+ pgvector), a vector DB (Qdrant / Pinecone / Weaviate), and Redis. - A Builder (4+ years): built APIs and systems from scratch (plus points for founder/employee 1–5). Pragmatic full-stack, backend-heavy, ships React when the customer needs it. - Data & quality obsessed with deep scraping experience; wrong data in regulated products has real consequences. - Founding DNA: priorities shift fast; you adapt. The Team, No layers. No politics. 100% deep work. - Karina: 3× scale-up operator. Directed market entries at Palantir in the run-up to IPO and ran an $11M CPG portfolio at P&G. - Leonie: Medical doctor and founder of Switzerland's first venture-backed longevity clinic. Leads science and regulatory intelligence. - Boe: Full-stack wizard with massive 0→1 experience. Your closest technical partner. Why Kensai - Founding equity: You're a stakeholder, not an employee. - High autonomy: Just focus on building. - Global impact: We're solving a massive headache for the world's biggest brands. - Flexible location: Work from wherever you are most productive, with high-intensity in-person sprints in Zurich to bond and brainstorm. How to Apply The founders read every application. In exchange, skip the résumé theater or the LLM Jargon and show us how you actually build. Send an email to [email protected] with the exact subject line: Kensai | Founding engineer. 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 + your LinkedIn profile. 2. A 20-minute take: Take Ritual.com Women’s Multivitamin 18+ and sketch how you'd build a SKU-level intelligence dashboard for it (claims, ingredients, sourcing, attributes). We don't want polished code — send a schema architecture or a Loom of your approach. We want 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. Our promise: A real yes/no reply from a founder within 5 business days. We respect your time because we're asking you to respect ours. No AI jargon. Come build the thing that doesn't exist yet.