Founding AI Engineer
Full-timeMontreal (Hybrid)
Kouvre is the AI agent for restaurants. Independent owners text it like an employee and it runs the business: promos, menus, prices, reviews, their website, all across UberEats, DoorDash, and Skip at once. No dashboards. We're already making restaurants money. One BOGO at a Montreal spot, launched by a single text, lifted UberEats revenue by 1,000% on a slow Tuesday.
As our Founding AI Engineer, you own the brain. You will partner closely with the Founding CTO to turn a plain-text message into the right action, building the reasoning, the agents, and the evals that make Kouvre feel less like software and more like a sharp employee who never drops the ball.
The Mission
- For the owner: Make Kouvre understand intent. When an owner texts "fill my slow Tuesday," Kouvre has to know what that means and do the right thing: the promo, the platform, the timing, without a brief.
- For the company: Make the agent trustworthy. The gap between a fun demo and a business owners depend on is everything you'll build: reliability, judgment, and knowing what not to do.
What You'll Build
- The reasoning layer: The agent logic that maps a casual text to the correct, complete action across platforms, handling ambiguity the way a good employee would.
- The action agents: Generative agents that draft promo copy, build a campaign, reply to a review in the restaurant's voice, or turn a new dish into a social post.
- The eval pipeline: The harness that proves a change made the agent better, not just different. Your safeguard against shipping regressions into someone's livelihood.
- The judgment guardrails: Knowing when to act, when to confirm, and when to stay quiet. A 10/10 action or nothing.
- The continuous edge: Feedback loops that make the agent sharper with every restaurant it runs.
What We're Looking For
- Deep agent intuition: You've built real LLM systems (tool-use, orchestration, retrieval, evals) and you know their failure modes cold.
- Product instinct: You care about the owner's outcome, not model benchmarks. You think "did it do the right thing," not "was the output plausible."
- Ship-it capability: You take an idea from notebook to production and own the path to real users.
- Scrappy with ambiguity: Small datasets, messy real-world signals, and fuzzy goals energize you.
- Clear thinking: You can explain a precision, latency, and cost trade-off plainly and make the call.
Why This is Different
- AI is the product. You're building the thing the company is, not a feature on a dashboard.
- Founding equity, and the rare chance to define an AI discipline from scratch, with a CTO who backs you.
- Live proof it works. An operator-led company that's already making restaurants money.
- Zero bureaucracy. Proof of work over process. The best agent is one an owner forgets is software.
- Montreal-based and hybrid. Work from home, and meet in person when it matters.
How to Apply
- Skip the resume and cover letter. We value proof of work over credentials. Show us something hard you've built and shipped, and the hunger to outbuild everyone else.
