Senior Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Senior Applied AI Engineer

Location: Onsite, Boston

Start: October 2026

Please only apply if you are already based in the USA.

The Role

We are looking for an exceptional Senior Applied AI Engineer to design and ship AI-native products and internal platforms that solve real operational and engineering problems.

This is not a role for someone whose primary experience is building chatbots, RAG demos or simple LLM integrations.

You will be a technical owner, responsible for identifying opportunities, defining problems, designing architectures, establishing evaluation criteria, shipping production systems and owning their outcomes.

You will combine strong software engineering with deep practical expertise in LLMs, multimodal models, agentic systems, retrieval, evaluation and AI product development.

Key Responsibilities

Design and deploy production AI applications using LLMs, multimodal models and agentic workflows.

Own the lifecycle from problem discovery and prototyping through evaluation, deployment, monitoring and improvement.

Design robust systems incorporating retrieval, memory, tools, orchestration, state and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Engineer around AI failure modes including hallucination, unreliable outputs, tool failures and non-deterministic behaviour.

Build rigorous evaluation frameworks using automated benchmarks, synthetic data, human feedback and production metrics.

Build reusable AI infrastructure, SDKs and patterns that accelerate AI development across the company.

Optimise systems for reliability, latency, cost, security and user experience.

Integrate AI with APIs, databases, knowledge systems, MCP servers and business workflows.

Define technical standards and roadmaps for Applied AI across the organisation.

Required

6+ years of hands-on experience building production software and AI systems.

Strong production experience with modern LLMs/foundation models.

Deep understanding of agentic architectures, RAG, tool use, memory, state, structured outputs and orchestration.

Strong experience evaluating and monitoring AI systems in production.

Excellent Python engineering skills.

Strong architectural judgement across capability, reliability, cost, latency and security.

Experience personally owning AI problems from discovery through production.

Experience defining scope, priorities and technical roadmaps rather than simply receiving them.

Experience working in small/medium-sized businesses, ideally under 500 employees, with significant autonomy.identifying the highest-value problems independently, setting direction, and driving to done or to a clean stop without oversight

Preferred

Experience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, DSPy, PydanticAI, Haystack, CrewAI, AutoGen or equivalent.

Multi-agent and complex workflow experience.

AI observability, synthetic evaluation and prompt/model optimisation.

Open-source model inference and infrastructure.

Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD and modern cloud infrastructure.

Experience in scientific computing, hardware, manufacturing, laboratory automation or similarly complex environments.

Who We Are Looking For

You should be able to demonstrate that you have personally designed and shipped production AI systems, made difficult architectural trade-offs, dealt with real-world AI failures and measured whether your systems actually delivered value.

If your experience is primarily AI demos, prompt engineering or implementing architectures defined by others, this role is unlikely to be suitable.

The AI Engineering team requires and engineer who can identify the highest-value problems independently, setting direction, and driving to done or to a clean stop without oversight.

Application

Please share a resume and, ideally, 2–3 examples of AI systems you personally designed and shipped, covering:

The problem and why AI was appropriate

Your architecture and technical decisions

How you evaluated it

A significant failure/challenge

What you personally owned

The measurable outcome

We care more about technical ownership and judgement than the number of AI frameworks on your resume,

Please share a resume if intersted.