JOB-1873
Our client is an early-stage commerce software company that wants a senior engineer to lead the AI foundation of its product. It is a production role for people who ship to paying merchants, and as a very early technical hire, the choices made in the opening weeks will define the architecture for a long time.
Your focus
- Take charge of every AI system end to end, from prompts and retrieval to tool calling, agent orchestration and fine-tuning when it truly pays off
- Put evaluation harnesses in place before features are built, so model changes are validated rather than assumed
- Bring latency and inference cost to figures that make sense under real merchant load rather than in a demo
- Look at an unclear product problem and work out whether the cause is the model, the data or the user experience, then solve it
- Deploy to production each week and observe how the changes behave in the field
What you bring
- Five to fifteen years of engineering, including a substantial stretch delivering production LLM-powered products used by actual customers
- Strong Python plus enough full-stack skill that you are never stuck waiting on someone else
- Evaluation suites you wrote that flagged a quality drop before any customer noticed
- A history of driving a project from idea to launch with no manager assigning the work
- Original thinking: you drive your own ideas and zero-to-one work instead of only executing specs
- A background at a company with a rigorous engineering bar, such as a Series A to D startup or a strong big-tech employer
- A bias for building and measuring rather than theorizing; computer science degree, with commerce or fine-tuning exposure a plus
On-site in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visa sponsorship is not available.
