ML AI Engineer
San Francisco, CA - USA
Job Summary
This is a founding-team ML / AI Engineer position at a consumer SaaS startup where you will architect and build the intelligent systems that power core product experiences. You will own the full stack from data pipelines to user-facing AI features working closely with product and design to make complex ML feel intuitive and magical.
- Architect and build ML and retrieval systems that power the core product experience.
- Design and evolve data pipelines that ingest classify enrich and summarize large volumes of user data.
- Build scalable inference infrastructure for both real-time and batch workloads.
- Lead model selection fine-tuning embeddings RAG pipelines evaluation frameworks and quality measurement.
- Prototype quickly to explore new ML-powered product ideas then harden and ship what works.
- Apply product judgment to make complex AI systems feel simple and delightful to end users.
- Collaborate with product design and engineering to create features that feel alive and deeply useful.
- Lay the groundwork for ML excellence inside a small senior team.
- 3 years in ML / AI roles building and shipping ML-powered features such as personalization ranking search or recommendations at consumer product or AI companies.
- Demonstrated experience taking ML-powered product features from 0 to 1 with tangible user-facing results.
- Hands-on custom ML model development with embeddings recommendation systems or personalization models (not limited to LLM prompting or wrappers).
- Experience with data pipelines vector databases RAG and semantic search infrastructure.
- Familiarity with inference infrastructure and deployment in production environments.
- Strong CS Math EECS or equivalent technical foundation.
- Background at a consumer product company or a leading AI company ideally with early-stage startup experience.
- Ability to work backwards from user experience to determine what ML system to build.
- Comfort with ambiguity fast iteration and end-to-end ownership on a small high-trust team.
- Proficiency with Python; experience with FastAPI PostgreSQL and vector databases is a strong plus.
Base salary: $200000 to $300000 USD annually plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
On-site in San Francisco CA. Remote work is not available for this position.