Overview

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 overseeing the organization's AI strategy.

This role focuses on building, testing, evaluating, and continuously improving AI-powered products that deliver measurable customer value rather than academic research.

What You'll Do

• •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

Required Qualifications

• •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

Why Join

• •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