Senior AI Engineer
About the role
Senior AI Engineer
Compensation: $200,000 - $300,000 base + equity
Location: Remote, USA
Join an early-stage applied AI company building the infrastructure and agent layer required to automate complex enterprise knowledge work. The company is already seeing exceptional commercial traction and is now expanding a very small engineering team behind that growth.
This is a highly autonomous role for an engineer who has already built production AI agents and wants to work across backend engineering, AI systems, data, product, and customer-facing
technical delivery.
The Mission
The company is building AI systems that can understand how businesses actually operate.
That means connecting fragmented enterprise systems, working through messy operational data, creating a unified business context layer, and deploying agents directly into real workflows.
The long-term goal is to turn traditionally manual data integration, application development, and workflow automation into reusable AI-native platform capabilities rather than one-off consulting projects.
The Role
You will take ambiguous business problems from initial customer conversation through architecture and production deployment. You'll work directly with customers to understand their objectives, inspect source systems and data, determine what is technically possible, and build a working V1.
At the same time, you'll contribute to the core platform and help solve harder technical problems around agent infrastructure, enterprise data, ontology generation, and autonomous workflow execution.
What You'll Do
Build and own production AI agents used in real enterprise workflows.
Take customer problems from initial scope through architecture, implementation, deployment, and iteration.
Integrate agents with enterprise systems, APIs, operational data, and existing workflows.
Work with fragmented and overlapping data sources to create usable business context.
Design reliable backend systems supporting production agent execution.
Diagnose agent failures, reliability issues, and unexpected production behaviour.
Define how success is measured and improve systems based on real customer outcomes.
Contribute to shared platform capabilities that can be reused across customers.
Help solve R&D problems around business ontologies, agent generation, and AI-native enterprise infrastructure.
Work directly with founders and technical leadership while taking significant ownership over your work.
What You'll Bring
Meaningful experience personally building production AI agents inside a company.
Clear end-to-end ownership of systems that reached real users or business workflows.
Strong backend software engineering fundamentals.
Experience working with LLMs, agents, orchestration, tools, APIs, or AI-driven workflows.
Ability to discuss architecture decisions, failure modes, debugging, reliability, and production tradeoffs in depth.
Comfort working across backend engineering, AI, data, infrastructure, and product.
Strong technical judgement and the ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments.
Startup experience is highly preferred.
Customer-facing or forward-deployed engineering experience is valuable.
ML experience is useful, but narrow specialization in areas such as fine-tuning or evals alone is not the target.
Why Join?
Join at a rare stage where commercial traction has arrived before the organization has meaningfully scaled.
Take significantly more technical and customer ownership than you would in a traditional engineering role.
Work directly with founders on hard AI and enterprise infrastructure problems.
Build systems that solve measurable business problems rather than isolated demos or proofs of concept.
Contribute to both customer-facing AI deployments and the underlying platform powering them.
Gain unusually broad exposure across technology, customers, product, and commercial decision-making.
About People In AI
We partner with AI-first startups, scale-ups, and enterprise organizations to connect exceptional engineers with opportunities to build production AI systems, intelligent platforms, and the next generation of enterprise AI.
Responsibilities
- Build and own production AI agents used in real enterprise workflows
- Take customer problems from initial scope through architecture, implementation, deployment, and iteration
- Integrate agents with enterprise systems, APIs, operational data, and existing workflows
- Work with fragmented and overlapping data sources to create usable business context
- Design reliable backend systems supporting production agent execution
- Diagnose agent failures, reliability issues, and unexpected production behaviour
- Define how success is measured and improve systems based on real customer outcomes
- Contribute to shared platform capabilities that can be reused across customers
Qualifications
- Meaningful experience personally building production AI agents inside a company
- Clear end-to-end ownership of systems that reached real users or business workflows
- Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
- Experience working with LLMs, agents, orchestration, tools, APIs, or AI-driven workflows
- Ability to discuss architecture decisions, failure modes, debugging, reliability, and production tradeoffs in depth
- Comfort working across backend engineering, AI, data, infrastructure, and product
- Strong technical judgement and the ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments
- Startup experience is highly preferred
Benefits
- Join at a rare stage where commercial traction has arrived before the organization has meaningfully scaled
- Take significantly more technical and customer ownership than you would in a traditional engineering role
- Work directly with founders on hard AI and enterprise infrastructure problems
- Build systems that solve measurable business problems rather than isolated demos or proofs of concept
- Contribute to both customer-facing AI deployments and the underlying platform powering them
- Gain unusually broad exposure across technology, customers, product, and commercial decision-making
Skills mentioned
About People In AI
People In AI is a specialist search firm focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, data, and software engineering. We partner with venture-backed AI companies, established technology businesses, and global investment firms to hire exceptional technical talent across the United States and Canada. Our recruiters operate within clearly defined specialist markets, giving clients access to deeper talent networks and candidates a more informed search experience. We support hiring across: • AI and Machine Learning Engineering • Research and Applied Science • Forward Deployed Engineering • Data Science, Data Engineering, and Analytics • Software and Platform Engineering • Product, Technical, and Executive Leadership • Quantitative and Investment Data Our services include contingent search, retained search, and tailored hiring partnerships for individual mandates and multi-role growth initiatives. We are particularly experienced in complex, senior, and difficult-to-fill searches where technical understanding, market access, and candidate engagement are critical. View our current opportunities: www.peopleinai.com/jobs