Founder Fellow - Applied AI

Pennant is growing fast and opening our NYC office (IRL is a must for this role). Come pace the frontier with us for this unique opportunity to join a YC-backed company fresh off the summer batch, and report directly to the Co-Founder/CTO and have tangible impact on our company every single day.

Company Description Pennant is building AI-native software for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting and shareholder/company engagement. Institutional investors, public companies and their advisors make consequential decisions using information scattered across filings, policies, research and on the desk conversations. We bring that information together so teams can understand the evidence, apply their own judgment and preserve why they made a decision. We're bringing frontier AI capabilities Our ambition is a world model for corporate governance: a system that connects institutional knowledge, policies, decisions and outcomes. Getting there starts with reliable data and software customers trust in their daily work.

Role Description Founder Fellow – Applied AI & Engineering is a seasonal role (with potential to convert to full-time) on-site position based in New York, NY. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO; works directly with both founders and domain experts. You’ll be embedded with the founding Pennant team to design, build, and ship the core AI features of the product. This is not a sandbox project. Your work will go to customers who use it to make real governance decisions, and you'll help decide both what we build and how we build it.

Qualifications

• Available to work IRL in NYC
• A builder with a portfolio: shipped projects, GitHub repos, hackathon wins, or products people actually use
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and familiarity with embeddings, vector search, prompt design, or agent frameworks
• Experience with document parsing/OCR, information extraction, or financial/legal text
• Familiarity with evals, fine-tuning, or LLM observability tools
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS/GCP), Postgres, and CI/CD
• Prior startup, research, or founding experience
• Comfortable using AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Conductor, VSCode) to move fast without giving up quality
• Solid grasp of data modeling, APIs, and working with unstructured data
• A product sense for when something is good enough to ship and when it needs another pass
• Clear communicator who can explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers
• Curious about fintech, capital markets, and corporate governance
• Collaborative, adaptable, and comfortable with the ambiguity of an early-stage startup

Nice to Have

• Experience with document parsing/OCR, information extraction, or financial/legal text
• Familiarity with evals, fine-tuning, or LLM observability tools
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS/GCP), Postgres, and CI/CD
• Prior startup, research, or founding experience