About Ardent:

Ardent is building THE production-grade AI Data Engineer. In 5 years, almost all Data Engineering will be done by agents. Pipelines will be built with minutes of engineering time instead of weeks. Massive-scale systems will be debugged while you sleep. Every company in the world will have to adapt—or fall behind.

This will be the new normal. And it's happened before:

• Google wrote history for search
• OpenAI wrote history for AI
• Now we're writing history for Data Engineering.

We want you to make your mark—your own page in that history.

About This Role:

As a Founding Engineer (ML), you'll be building SOTA AI Agents from the ground up. We're a small team moving fast in an entirely new category. We're looking for incredibly ambitious, deeply technical people who learn extremely fast and love building at the edge of unsolved problems.

You will own the development of autonomous agents that can plan and execute long-range multi-step data engineering tasks in production environments.

We work in-person in San Francisco.

What You'll Do:

• Build SOTA AI Agents that can plan and execute long-range multi-step data engineering tasks in production environments (examples: https://github.com/ArdentAI1/DE-Bench).
• Develop agents that reason about complex data schemas, pipeline dependencies, and failure modes.
• Create self-debugging systems that improve over time through learned experience.
• Talk directly to customers to understand their data engineering pain points and iterate based on feedback.
• Deploy and optimize reasoning models in production environments.
• Build scalable foundations for agent orchestration and memory systems.
• Ensure systems are efficient, maintainable, and production-ready.
• Shape our product roadmap by identifying the highest-impact problems to solve next.
• Other things that may come up from time to time to move our company forward (or keep the lights on).

Qualifications:

• 2-3 years of IC experience with a focus on ML systems. You balance moving fast with building scalable implementations that can grow with us.
• Deep LLM expertise: Hands-on experience building with LLMs, with strong intuition for what models can do and how to get the best results. Experience with agent tuning (fine-tuning/prompt tuning) and deploying reasoning models in production environments.
• Production-scale experience: You've built and deployed agentic systems at scale with real-world production experience. Your work examples demonstrate reliability and thoughtful technical design.
• Data obsession: You're passionate about the data space and have experience with data engineering tools like Airflow, Databricks, Spark, or similar orchestration/processing frameworks.
• Self-direction and ownership: You repeatedly, independently identify the most valuable work and dive in—even when requirements and priorities shift rapidly in our fast-moving environment.
• Strong technical communication: Decisive, clear communication on both technical and strategic matters. As a founding engineer, you'll help build our company's foundations and should have opinions about our technical direction and be comfortable sharing them.
• 0→1 mentality: You thrive in early-stage environments where every technical decision shapes our future. You're energized by ambiguity and the opportunity to define systems from the ground up.

Bonus points: Background in data infrastructure at scale, previous startup experience, or you've founded a company yourself.

Stack: AdalFlow/DSPY, AWS (Bedrock), Langgraph/agent orchestration tools, Memory layer (like Mem0),

What We Offer:

• Cutting edge work building the future of autonomous data engineering.
• Competitive salary + significant equity package.
• Your choice of equipment and office setup.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Unlimited PTO.
• The opportunity to define an entire category before anyone else realizes what's happening.