Founding AI Engineer

About the role

FOUNDING AI ENGINEER (AI + PRODUCTION)

New York City (5 days on-site) · Top of market + equity + benefits

TL;DR: Build AI that accelerates nuclear deployment. Own AI production from evals to fine-tuning. Push the frontier on physics models, world models, and AI-accelerated simulations. High-leverage IC role with founding-level impact.

THE MISSION

Everstar builds the intelligence layer that makes nuclear power actually deployable—collapsing regulatory and manufacturing timelines from years to months. Gordian already powers engineering and compliance work for utilities, advanced reactor companies, and hyperscalers. We pair deep nuclear domain expertise with frontier AI and move with startup speed.

Now we need a Founding AI Engineer to turn research breakthroughs into production systems that ship—and push beyond LLMs into physics-informed AI, world models, and simulation acceleration.

You’ll be joining the Apollo Team of Nuclear. You’ll build alongside engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Google, and Microsoft. You’ll learn from nuclear and national security experts who cut their teeth at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CIA, and NuScale.

THE ROLE (REPORTING TO THE CEO)

Not a researcher. Not a prompt engineer. This is a production-first role.

You'll own the AI stack end-to-end—from eval frameworks to fine-tuning pipelines to agent orchestration. But you'll also push the boundaries of what AI can do for nuclear: AI-accelerated weather simulations, design safety analyses powered by physics models, and world model applications that transform nuclear operations.

Think 70% building production systems / 30% frontier R&D with access to Microsoft and NVIDIA's latest tools through our first-party partnerships and a large AI research budget to experiment aggressively.

Most weeks you'll be shipping new model capabilities, debugging eval failures, and scaling inference—then immediately applying what you learned to the next sprint. Some weeks you'll be prototyping physics-informed models, running GPU-accelerated simulations, or collaborating directly with NVIDIA and Microsoft researchers.

You will:

- Build production AI agents: power Gordian Search, Research, and Compose with outputs that are truthful, complete, and auditable—because in nuclear, "mostly right" isn't good enough.

- Design eval infrastructure: create benchmarking suites that catch regressions before customers do; instrument quality metrics that actually matter.

- Own fine-tuning pipelines: generate synthetic data, run ablations, and ship domain-adapted models that outperform off-the-shelf LLMs on nuclear regulatory tasks.

- Push the frontier (R&D): - AI-accelerated weather simulations for site qualification and environmental impact assessments—replacing months of modeling with hours - Physics-informed design safety analyses using world models that reason about thermal hydraulics, neutronics, and structural integrity - Vision + physics models for automated document analysis, construction monitoring, and operational anomaly detection - Agentic workflows that compound over time, learning from each regulatory submission to improve the next