Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Applied AI Engineer - AI Startups

San Francisco

The Opportunity:

We are working with a number of high-growth AI startups hiring engineers focused specifically on building AI products in production.

These are not traditional ML research roles. The focus is on taking the latest models and techniques and turning them into reliable products, workflows and systems used by real customers.

You could be joining an early team building from 0→1 or a well-funded AI company scaling quickly after finding strong product-market fit.

The Role:

We are looking to speak with Applied AI Engineers who enjoy working at the intersection of software engineering, product and machine learning.

You could be:

Building production-grade LLM applications and agentic workflows

Designing RAG, retrieval and knowledge systems

Building evaluations, guardrails and observability for AI products

Working with structured and unstructured data at scale

Experimenting with models, prompting, fine-tuning and inference strategies

Integrating AI systems into real customer workflows

Taking AI features from prototype through production

What We’re Looking For:

Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals

Hands-on experience building with modern LLMs

Experience shipping AI or ML products into production

Familiarity with RAG, agents, evaluations or model orchestration

Strong product judgment and experimentation skills

Ability to move quickly in ambiguous, early-stage environments

Genuine interest in building practical AI systems rather than purely academic research

Why Join:

Work directly with founders and small technical teams

Build at the frontier of applied AI

Own AI systems from experimentation through production

Ship quickly and see direct customer feedback

Work on genuinely 0→1 problems

Join companies where AI is the core product rather than an add-on