Applied AI Engineer

About the role

An early-stage AI company building intelligent automation products for a highly regulated industry is seeking an Applied AI Engineer. This is a foundational role with significant ownership over the direction of the company's AI platform. As the company grows, this position is expected to evolve into a leadership role oversee the organization's AI strategy. The role focuses on building, testing, evaluating, and continuously improving AI-powered products that deliver measurable customer value rather than academic research.

Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Onsite, Full-Time)

Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, and optimize production AI applications powered by large language models
• Evaluate foundation models and determine the best solution for specific product use cases
• Design prompt strategies and iterate on them using structured testing and performance metrics
• Develop evaluation frameworks that measure quality, accuracy, reliability, and business outcomes
• Fine-tune language models using proprietary datasets when appropriate
• Design AI workflows that continuously improve through production data and human feedback
• Build scalable backend services and APIs that integrate AI capabilities into customer-facing products
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate business problems into practical AI solutions
• Monitor production performance and continuously improve latency, reliability, and response quality
• Ensure AI systems meet security, privacy, compliance, and scalability requirements
• Stay current with emerging AI techniques, models, and tooling, recommending new technologies when they provide meaningful value

Requirements

• 4-8 years of professional experience building production AI or machine learning applications
• Demonstrated success shipping AI products used by real customers
• Strong Python development experience
• Experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Experience building applications with LLM orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, Instructor, or similar tools
• Experience evaluating and improving LLM performance through experimentation and testing
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including systems design and scalable application development
• Ability to translate business objectives into practical AI solutions
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to work onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at an early-stage startup or high-growth technology company
• Experience fine-tuning language models using proprietary datasets
• Experience designing automated evaluation frameworks and benchmarking pipelines
• Experience deploying reinforcement learning or human-feedback optimization workflows
• Experience with conversational AI, voice technologies, or real-time AI applications
• Experience building AI systems within regulated industries
• Contributions to open-source AI projects, technical writing, conference speaking, or the broader AI community

Benefits

• Build AI products that solve meaningful, real-world problems
• Work directly with company leadership on technical strategy
• Own major architectural decisions across the AI platform
• Influence the future direction of AI within a rapidly growing company
• Opportunity to grow into a senior technical leadership role as the organization scales
• Competitive salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits