Artificial Intelligence Engineer

About the company

Our client is a 15-person consumer AI company building an agentic travel platform that understands individual preferences and can plan and book real-time travel experiences. Its product connects conversational intelligence with live inventory from major travel and hospitality brands, allowing users to discover and book verified options in one conversation.

Responsibilities

• Own the full agent architecture, including prompts, tool calling, multi-step reasoning, and streaming
• Productionize conversational state and memory systems that interpret user preferences
• Build ranking, retrieval, and recommendation experiences that surface useful, personalized results
• Improve multi-turn reliability through refinement loops, error recovery, and graceful degradation
• Design the rendering layer between agent output and the consumer product experience
• Manage provider strategy across leading model vendors, including caching, structured outputs, and fallback behavior
• Define and operate evaluation systems for ranking, retrieval, and agent behavior
• Debug production failure modes and continuously improve quality using evidence from real users

Requirements

• At least four years of experience as a full-stack or backend-leaning software engineer
• Experience shipping LLM-powered ranking, retrieval, or recommendation systems into production
• Hands-on ownership of systems where models interpret user preferences and surface results
• Real evaluation experience, including defining, running, and iterating on quality metrics
• Comfort across prompting, embeddings, retrieval, memory, preferences, and product-facing agent workflows
• Strong ability to explain specific production failures you diagnosed and corrected
• An AI-native development workflow and a track record of learning and shipping quickly
• Willingness to work regularly from New York City

Bonus points

• Experience in travel, search relevance, personalization, memory, or consumer recommendations
• Experience at a high-growth startup or top technology company
• Proficiency in TypeScript, with Python also welcome
• Significant side projects involving AI agents or production-grade LLM systems
• A strong academic or equivalent technical signal

Pay

Total compensation of $350K–$500K

Benefits

• Competitive equity
• Direct ownership of a core consumer AI product surface
• Visa transfers, including OPT or H-1B transfers, may be considered case by case

Schedule

Full-time position

Location

Hybrid in New York City