Applied AI Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA — In Person
Employment: Full-time
Experience: 2–7 years
Compensation: $250,000–$500,000 + 1%–5% equity
Visa Sponsorship: Available

About the Role

We're looking for an exceptional Applied AI Engineer to build zero-to-one AI products at the frontier of agentic systems.

This is a highly hands-on role spanning product engineering, AI models, agent workflows, and infrastructure. You'll take new AI capabilities and turn them into reliable, intuitive products that solve real user problems.

The ideal candidate combines exceptional engineering ability with strong product judgment and taste, moves quickly from first principles to production, and thrives with significant ownership in an early-stage environment.

What You'll Do

• Own 01 AI product areas from concept through production.
• Build across the stack, including user-facing interfaces, agent workflows, model orchestration, and infrastructure.
• Turn frontier AI capabilities into simple, useful, and reliable products.
• Prototype rapidly and make key product and technical decisions.
• Work directly with users to understand workflows and iterate quickly.
• Help shape product architecture and technical direction as an early team member.
• Experiment with new models, tools, and approaches to improve product capabilities.

What We're Looking For

• Exceptional software engineering ability with strong product judgment and taste.
• Experience shipping successful user-facing products, ideally from 01.
• Strong knowledge of modern AI systems and experience productizing AI models.
• Ability to operate across product, engineering, models, and infrastructure rather than within a narrow specialty.
• Evidence of exceptional ownership—such as founding a company, owning a major product, or shipping consequential work.
• High agency, ambition, speed, and ability to operate with significant autonomy.
• Strong intuition for turning complex AI capabilities into intuitive user experiences.
• Comfortable working directly with users and rapidly incorporating feedback.
• Excited to build in an intense, highly entrepreneurial early-stage environment.

Strong Plus

• Experience at a frontier AI or high-growth AI company.
• Agentic AI / AI agent product experience.
• Previous founder, founding engineer, or early-team experience.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, or working deeply with models.
• Successful independent products, startups, or open-source projects.
• Evidence of exceptional achievement in technical, quantitative, or competitive fields.