Applied AI Engineer

About the role

🚀 Hiring: Applied AI Engineer | $170K–$230K + Equity | NYC Build production AI systems that improve how a marketplace matches candidates with jobs, automates operations, and drives growth. We’re conducting a confidential search for an Applied AI Engineer to join an early engineering team.

You’ll work directly with the founder/CEO, shape technical decisions, and own projects from initial idea through architecture, deployment, and measurable business impact. 📍 Location: New York City — approximately 3 days/week in office; in-person collaboration strongly preferred 💼 Employment: Full-time, permanent 💰 Compensation: $170K–$230K + equity 📦 Relocation: Support available for strong candidates 🛂 Work authorization: Must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship

What you will do

Candidate-to-job matching systems that improve placement quality and speed.

Intelligent automation for manual marketplace workflows.

AI-powered classification, extraction, content generation, and search.

Evaluation and experimentation systems that measure accuracy, consistency, and business results.

Production features and development tooling that improve through real user feedback.

The role: approximately 60% AI/ML + 40% product engineering Your AI work will span model selection, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, LLM evaluation, embeddings, vector databases, and data pipelines.

You’ll also build the APIs, backend services, product and UI integrations, and infrastructure needed to bring those capabilities into production. What you’ll bring

4+ years of engineering experience.

Meaningful experience shipping AI/LLM features into production and owning projects end to end.

Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, embeddings, vector databases, and fine-tuning.

Strong full-stack web development skills.

Sound judgment around model selection, deployment, evaluation, and iteration.

The ability to connect technical decisions to measurable product and business outcomes.

Experience that stands out Early-stage or high-growth startup experience, founding-team engineering, recruiting or talent technology, and marketplace, matching, search, or recommendation systems. Who will thrive here You enjoy turning ambiguous business problems into working products.

You’re comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, collaborating directly with founders, and taking responsibility for launch and ongoing improvement. You know how to evaluate when prompting, fine-tuning, or switching models is the right approach. 📩 Interested?

Send me your resume and a brief example of an AI system you shipped to production, including your ownership and the measurable impact it created. Please include your target base salary and availability to work in NYC approximately three days per week. The company’s name is confidential at this stage.