Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Build production AI systems that improve how a marketplace matches candidates with jobs, automates operations, and drives growth. We’re conducting a confidential search for an Applied AI Engineer to join an early engineering team. You’ll work directly with the founder/CEO, shape technical decisions, and own projects from initial idea through architecture, deployment, and measurable business impact.

Responsibilities

• Develop candidate-to-job matching systems that improve placement quality and speed.
• Create intelligent automation for manual marketplace workflows.
• Build AI-powered classification, extraction, content generation, and search capabilities.
• Design evaluation and experimentation systems that measure accuracy, consistency, and business results.
• Implement production features and development tooling that improve through real user feedback.
• Allocate approximately 60% of effort to AI/ML and 40% to product engineering.
• Work on model selection, prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, LLM evaluation, embeddings, vector databases, and data pipelines.
• Develop APIs, backend services, product and UI integrations, and infrastructure to bring AI capabilities into production.

Requirements

• 4+ years of engineering experience.
• Meaningful experience shipping AI/LLM features into production and owning projects end to end.
• Hands‑on experience with LLM APIs, embeddings, vector databases, and fine‑tuning.
• Strong full‑stack web development skills.
• Sound judgment around model selection, deployment, evaluation, and iteration.
• Ability to connect technical decisions to measurable product and business outcomes.
• Experience that stands out: early‑stage or high‑growth startup experience, founding‑team engineering, recruiting or talent technology, and marketplace, matching, search, or recommendation systems.
• Enjoy turning ambiguous business problems into working products; comfortable making decisions with incomplete information; collaborate directly with founders; take responsibility for launch and ongoing improvement.
• Know how to evaluate when prompting, fine‑tuning, or switching models is the right approach.
• Must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

Benefits

• Relocation support available for strong candidates.

Pay

$170K–$230K + equity

Schedule

Full‑time, permanent position based in New York City with approximately 3 days/week in‑office; in‑person collaboration strongly preferred.