Job Description
Job DescriptionAbout the Role
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.
What You'll Do
- 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.
What We're Looking For
- 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.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote work is not available for this position.