Senior AI Engineer | Sage Home Loans

About the role

This role is a Senior AI Engineer position at Sage Home Loans, located in South Charlotte, NC. The role is hybrid, working from the headquarters Tuesday through Thursday and fully remote on Mondays and Fridays.

Responsibilities

• Work with cutting-edge generative AI technologies such as LLMs and collaborate with other highly talented AI and software engineers.
• Help build and improve AI-enabled products such as automated document processing, auto condition clearing, income calculation, call scoring, and virtual assistants.
• Design and own our AI eval infrastructure—golden datasets, automated regression suites, LLM-as-judge pipelines, and online quality metrics for our LLM-powered products.
• Lead model, harness, and training decisions across the AI stack—foundation model selection across vendors, agent frameworks and orchestration, custom fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, LoRA), and RAG/retrieval design.
• Design safety guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and PII handling appropriate to regulated mortgage workflows.
• Design and execute end-to-end AI systems with attention to reliability, latency, cost, and observability in production.
• Take ideas from discovery to production solutions—thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast.
• Partner with business stakeholders and work effectively across business, creative, and engineering groups to solve problems and build a positive culture across teams.
• Provide guidance to the broader applied AI community within Red Ventures on the design and execution of AI projects, especially where you bring specific expertise.
• Drive the development of junior team members through mentorship and coaching.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with at least 1 year building LLM-powered systems. BS/MS in CS, ML, or a related field preferred; equivalent applied experience welcome in lieu of a degree.
• Demonstrated experience shipping LLM-powered products to production, including hands-on work with prompt design, agent harnesses, and tool use.
• Hands-on experience building eval frameworks—benchmark design, golden dataset curation, LLM-as-judge, and regression testing for prompts and models.
• Experience selecting and integrating foundation models from multiple vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI, open-weight models), and reasoning about cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with post-training techniques (SFT, DPO, LoRA) and RAG/retrieval system design, including embedding model selection. Comfort operating in a regulated/financial environment is a plus.
• Experience with end-to-end model development, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring workflows, including LLM-based products in production.
• Proficiency with a modern data platform (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar).
• Familiarity with TypeScript/React/Node a plus, for app integration (nice-to-have).
• Ability to methodically understand business context, define value propositions, and formulate and solve complex applied AI problems.
• Ability to clearly articulate the “why” behind proposed AI solutions to relevant stakeholders.
• Ability to own key deliverables and use problem-solving to deliver projects on time, iterating when justified by incremental value.
• Ability to intake business requests and priorities, prioritize bodies of work, and communicate project status, timeline, and technical results to broad audiences.
• Bias to action and proactive communication—every second counts.
• Experience expanding the knowledge of an AI engineering team through teaching and mentoring on topics where you have specific expertise.
• Experience leveraging technical expertise to identify the feasibility of potential AI projects, ensuring the team delivers value on projects that are feasible.
• Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape and translates new techniques, models, and tooling into shipped product—a commitment to getting better every day.

Benefits

• Health Insurance Coverage (medical, dental, and vision)
• Life Insurance
• Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Holiday Pay
• 401(k) with match
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Parental Bonding Benefit Program
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO): 20 days annually, increasing to 25 after five years of service

Pay

Total Cash Compensation Range: $150k – $220k per year

Schedule

Hybrid schedule, working from headquarters Tuesday through Thursday and fully remote on Mondays and Fridays.

Skills

• Experience with cutting-edge generative AI technologies such as LLMs
• Hands-on experience with prompt design, agent harnesses, and tool use
• Experience with eval frameworks, including benchmark design, golden dataset curation, LLM-as-judge, and regression testing
• Experience with foundation model selection from multiple vendors and cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs
• Experience with post-training techniques (SFT, DPO, LoRA) and RAG/retrieval system design
• Experience with end-to-end model development, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring workflows
• Proficiency with a modern data platform (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar)
• Familiarity with TypeScript/React/Node for app integration (nice-to-have)
• Ability to methodically understand business context, define value propositions, and solve complex applied AI problems
• Ability to clearly articulate the “why” behind proposed AI solutions to relevant stakeholders
• Ability to own key deliverables and iterate on projects
• Experience expanding the knowledge of an AI engineering team through teaching and mentoring
• Experience identifying the feasibility of potential AI projects
• Staying current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape

Benefits

• Health Insurance Coverage (medical, dental, and vision)
• Life Insurance
• Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Holiday Pay
• 401(k) with match
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Parental Bonding Benefit Program
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO): 20 days annually, increasing to 25 after five years of service

Pay

Total Cash Compensation Range: $150k – $220k per year