Applied AI Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $190K – $240K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for an Applied AI Engineer with 2-5 years of experience building and shipping AI systems used by real people. You’re comfortable working with modern LLM-based systems and agentic workflows, and you know how to turn powerful models into reliable product features. You have strong product judgment and think deeply about tradeoffs between LLM approaches and traditional ML when designing solutions. You care about evaluation, iteration speed, and making sure AI systems actually drive measurable business impact.

Experience building LLM-powered applications, retrieval systems, tool-using agents, or AI-driven automation is a plus. Familiarity with traditional ML techniques such as ranking, recommendation, or classification is helpful when designing hybrid systems that balance performance, cost, and reliability.

What you’ll do

Design and build AI systems that power matchmaking, ranking, and automation across the Paraform marketplace.

• Develop LLM-driven features such as retrieval pipelines, agentic workflows, and AI-powered automation that improve how recruiters and companies interact on the platform.

• Own systems end-to-end, from data pipelines and prompt or model design to deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production.

• Work closely with product, ML engineers, and full-stack teams to ship AI capabilities that directly move marketplace metrics.

• Design evaluation frameworks that measure real-world performance, reliability, and business outcomes, not just offline model quality.

• Help define best practices for building and operating production AI systems at Paraform, balancing model quality, cost, latency, and maintainability.

• Raise the bar for how AI is integrated into product experiences across the platform.

Who you are

• 2 - 5 years of experience at a growing, AI native startup (series A - D)

• Worked on products that have scales to a large number of users (not just for a single enterprise customer)

• Strong Python and Typescript experience

• You've built agentic systems that power real business or user outcomes

• You thrive in ambiguous, 0 to 1 environments

• You can explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical partners

About Paraform:

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Cursor, Palantir, Windsurf, Decagon, Shopify, Coinbase, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That’s why we’re building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors – and we’re building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.