Founding Engineer at The Narrative Company
Why it's worth a look: First engineering hire building an AI conversation ranking engine in New York, offering $180,000 to $250,000 base salary plus equity.
The founder's post on X
We're hiring our founding engineer! Super pumped for this person to join our team :)https://t.co/3eIcTfK7ux
About the role
As the first engineering hire, build and scale Nia, the AI recommendation and ranking engine that parses X discussions, runs LLM judgment evaluations, and integrates with Slack.
What you'd do
- Ship data pipelines, review interfaces, and Slack/Teams integrations end-to-end
- Translate customer positioning and brand strategy into Nia's tracking sources, context retrieval, and ranking algorithms
- Build judgment evaluation sets and benchmarks to test relevance, timing, and reputational risk against accepted/rejected alerts
- Capture reviewer feedback and dimension changes to improve model ranking and prevent regression while maintaining strict multi-tenant data separation
- Directly join customer calls with CCOs and CMOs to shape product roadmap and architecture
What they're looking for
- Demonstrated track record of shipping full-stack software and supporting it in production
- Strong proficiency with APIs, relational databases, and debugging across the stack
- Daily user of AI coding tools with the ability to rigorously test and defend generated code
- Ability to take ambiguous customer feedback and quickly build working, dependable prototypes
- Interest in brand strategy and comfort communicating with senior business leaders
Nice to have
- Experience with LLM evaluations, retrieval systems (RAG), or recommendation engines
Gathered from the founder's post and the company's public pages.
Terms
- Location
- New York, NYFrom the company's pages, not the post
- Remote
- In-person / Hybrid (New York City)From the company's pages, not the post
- Salary
- $180,000 - $250,000 base salary + meaningful equityFrom the company's pages, not the post
- Equity
- Not mentioned in the post
Ask the founder
The company
nia
Builds AI-powered conversation recommendation and narrative intelligence tools on X for executive and marketing teams.
The Narrative Company builds Nia, an AI system that monitors conversations on X (Twitter) and identifies high-value opportunities for corporate brands and executive accounts to join the conversation. Nia translates brand positioning into targeted context retrieval, ranks posts against reputational risk and strategic relevance, and brings recommendations directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams for review.
Customers: Chief Communications Officers (CCOs), Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), and tech executives.
- Stage
- Seed / Pre-seed
- Team size
- 2-10
- Based in
- New York, NY
People
- Aadit Sheth · Co-founderStudied mechanical engineering at UCL; built Neatprompts (enterprise AI newsletter with 100k+ subscribers); angel investor in startups including Lovable and Wispr Flow.x.com
Our research
What we found
- The company operates Nia, a software layer paired with narrative strategists that helps enterprise brands engage on X.thenarrative.company
- This role is explicitly designated as the company's first engineering hire.thenarrative.company
- Compensation is clearly stated as $180,000 to $250,000 base plus equity.thenarrative.company
- Co-founder Aadit Sheth has an audience of 500k+ on X and previously built Neatprompts.x.com
- The company's terms of service cite governing law under the United Arab Emirates, while the engineering role is based in New York City.thenarrative.company
Our read
- Stage
- Pre-seed / SeedBased on: First engineering hire transitioning from an executive comms agency/service model to productized AI software.
- Team size
- 3-7 peopleBased on: No previous engineers on staff; small team composed of founders and narrative strategists.
- Engineer number
- #1Based on: Job posting explicitly titles the role 'First engineering hire'.
- Equity range
- 1.0% - 3.5%Based on: Market standard for a first founding engineer with an above-average cash salary ($180k-$250k) at the pre-seed/seed stage.
- Runway signal
- Revenue-supported / self-funded or angel-backedBased on: Operating as an active executive comms service with existing paying enterprise clients.
Estimates from public information, not confirmed by the company.
Worth asking the founder
- What stage is the current Nia codebase in, and who wrote the existing prototype?
- How does the startup handle X's API access, data scraping limitations, and rate pricing?
- Is the long-term vision to remain a tech-enabled agency or transition into a self-serve SaaS product?
- What is the company's current capitalization and runway structure?
- Is the role required to be fully on-site in NYC or is hybrid work supported?
How it works
- 1You write to the founderEmail or reply on X. Your words, your call — no form, no review.
- 2It reaches them directlyStraight to their inbox or their post. We're not in the thread.
- 3Got an offer? Tell usIt's how we know this works.
Founders reply to specifics: what you've built, a link, and why this role.