AI Engineer

Our client is an early-stage AI startup building the next generation of autonomous enterprise software. Backed by leading venture investors, the company has raised over $12 million in seed and inception financing and is rapidly expanding its engineering team as it scales its platform and customer base. With a founding team that combines deep AI expertise and startup experience, they're tackling complex, high-impact problems at the intersection of large language models, agentic AI, and enterprise automation. You'll lead the intelligence layer that powers our AI platform, owning the systems responsible for planning, execution, and continuous improvement. As our platform scales across enterprise customers processing billions of dollars in critical financial workflows, you'll build the infrastructure that ensures our AI operates accurately, efficiently, and reliably in production. Your work will directly impact some of the largest organizations across infrastructure, manufacturing, and defense. What You'll Be Doing Architect and evolve the core agent platform, including workflow execution, tool integrations, memory management, and autonomous decision-making. Develop intelligent model routing and orchestration systems that dynamically select the best models while maintaining flexibility across multiple AI providers. Create robust evaluation frameworks that automatically validate agent performance and detect regressions before new releases reach customers. Translate cutting-edge advances in agentic AI and LLM research into dependable production systems capable of handling complex, real-world workflows. Collaborate closely with applied AI engineers to leverage production feedback, continuously improving prompts, routing strategies, and overall system performance. Help shape the technical direction, engineering standards, and hiring philosophy as we continue to grow the AI engineering organization. What We're Looking For Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field from a leading university, along with 2+ years of software engineering or AI experience. Experience building and deploying production AI applications, whether agentic systems, autonomous workflows, computer-use agents, or sophisticated LLM-powered products. Deep understanding of modern LLM infrastructure, including orchestration frameworks, tool calling, retrieval systems, evaluation methodologies, and the tradeoffs between prompting, fine-tuning, and retrieval techniques. Demonstrated ability to take early-stage research concepts and transform them into scalable, production-ready solutions with minimal direction. Strong curiosity for emerging AI research, with a track record of rapidly applying new techniques to solve practical engineering challenges. A quality-first mindset, recognizing that rigorous evaluation, testing, and monitoring are just as important as advances in model capabilities. Compensation & Benefits Base Salary: $220,000-250,000 Equity: Meaningful founding-stage equity with significant long-term upside. Location: San Francisco, CA (5 days onsite) Show more Show less