Founding Applied AI Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

As the first senior AI hire at an early-stage AI company, you will own the quality and intelligence of its multi-channel marketing agents. You will shape agent architecture, evaluation systems, and learning loops, and help build the AI team as the company grows.

What You'll Do

• Improve the quality of agent-generated content for social channels and articles, using evaluation systems to make quality measurable.

• Improve performance across search engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

• Build feedback loops that help agents learn from real-world results and performance signals.

• Improve production AI infrastructure, agent architecture, model strategy, and supporting data pipelines.

• Help hire and lead the AI team as it grows.

What We're Looking For

• At least 3 years of experience building production ML or AI systems, including recent hands-on work shipping LLM products or agents.

• Experience designing evaluations and learning from outcome signals at scale in search, ranking, recommendations, or related areas.

• Proficiency in TypeScript, including Next.js, and Python for data analysis, evaluations, and model work, with a track record of shipping end to end.

• Production applied AI experience in areas such as LLM reasoning or post-training, generative AI, agentic systems, search, recommendations, algorithms, or machine learning research.

• Experience improving production AI systems and owning work in a startup or small-team environment.

• Background at a leading AI lab or research program, or another achievement demonstrating comparable technical depth.

• Experience with search, ranking, or AI answer engines is valuable. Marketing or go-to-market experience, recommendation systems, algorithms, and reinforcement learning are also relevant.

Compensation & Benefits

Target annual compensation is $180,000 to $230,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.