SAN FRANCISCO AI ENGINEER RECRUITMENT
We work with some of San Franciscos' leading brands to provide recruitment solutions across the Data & AI industries.
Harnham is a leading AI Engineer recruitment agency, specializing in connecting top AI Engineers, Machine Learning experts, and Software Engineers with San Francisco’s most innovative companies.
We partner with AI-driven businesses across industries to provide cutting-edge AI recruitment solutions, ensuring they secure the best talent in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data-centric AI.
Our consultants are experts in AI engineering recruitment, offering in-depth market insights that they learn from staying up to date with trends and events, salary benchmarking, and guidance throughout the hiring process, including technical interviews, leadership assessments, and project management support for hiring managers.
With an extensive database of experienced engineers in San Francisco, we help companies fill key roles in platform engineering, technical leadership, and engineering excellence—critical for businesses leveraging generative AI applications and machine learning frameworks.
Whether you need professionals with systems hands-on expertise or those who understand technical direction for AI-driven projects, Harnham delivers the best talent.
If you need AI professionals with strong communication skills, practical skills, and coding assessment expertise, Harnham’s San Francisco AI recruitment team is ready to help.
DATA & AI RECRUITMENT AND STAFFING
HOW WE DO IT
At Harnham, our AI Engineering recruitment strategy aligns with the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, allowing companies to scale efficiently.
Our San Francisco AI recruitment team specializes in hiring:
AI Engineers – Experts in machine learning frameworks, data-centric AI, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions
Software Engineers – Skilled in integrating AI-driven solutions into existing technology systems Engineering Leaders & Technical Leaders – Professionals with strong prioritization skills, leadership assessments, and experience in platform engineering
We ensure our candidates demonstrate sound judgment, a crucial trait when making AI-driven business decisions. They also have experience working with external clients, helping organizations implement AI at scale.
We understand the importance of collaboration in AI projects. Our candidates excel in working within cross-functional product teams and the wider team, ensuring seamless AI adoption in your business operations.
Additionally, our focus on communication skills ensures that every hire is capable of articulating complex AI concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Looking for AI Engineers in San Francisco? Contact us to access our network of top-tier AI and Machine Learning professionals.
WHAT SETS US APART FROM OTHER SAN FRANCISCO DATA & AI RECRUITMENT AGENCIES?
At Harnham, our recruitment consultants bring deep industry expertise, specializing in AI-driven businesses, Google Cloud AI, and Generative AI solutions. Whether you're building AI infrastructure on Google Cloud or another platform, we ensure that we source candidates who seamlessly align with your tech stack.
We also provide real-time salary benchmarking for AI Engineers in San Francisco, helping companies offer competitive compensation. Our leadership assessments are designed to identify engineering leaders who can drive AI and machine learning innovation within your organization. Additionally, we streamline the technical hiring process, conducting thorough technical interviews, coding assessments, and project management evaluations to ensure only top-quality hires.
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we are committed to helping businesses build diverse AI teams that foster innovation and success.
We believe AI hiring should be as innovative as the industry itself. Our decade of innovation in AI and data recruitment ensures we stay ahead of market trends, our consultants also stay up to date on locally relevant events, garnering insights to provide companies with top-tier candidates.
Our deep understanding of AI recruitment trends in San Francisco, combined with our engineering excellence, makes us the preferred choice for companies looking to hire AI Engineer Talent in San Francisco.
JOBS
LATEST SAN FRANCISCO
Data & AI JOBS
Harnham are a specialist Data & AI Recruitment business with teams that only focus on niche areas.
AI Engineer
San Francisco
$200000 - $220000
+ Life Science Analytics
PermanentSan Francisco, California
To Apply for this Job Click Here
AI Engineer
San Francisco, California
Remote
$200,000 – $220,000 + Equity
About the Company
This innovative health tech startup is working to improve the oncology drug development process by providing better patient data to drug developers as well as better access to clinical trials for patients. This series B startup is expending to meet demand.
About the Role
As an AI Engineer, you will design and deliver applied AI systems (LLMs/CV/multimodal) that automate clinical variable abstraction and clinical note generation-with repeatable validation, robust documentation, and HITL feedback loops. Heavy emphasis on data engineering and backend rigor to make models usable and efficient.
Role Responsibilities
- Build models and pipelines across EMR/EHR, imaging, clinical reports
- Translate ambiguous clinical requirements into measurable ML objectives
- Define metrics, design experiments, estimate error; review peer work
- Deliver validated AI components for abstraction/note generation; meaningfully reduce manual QA workload via HITL; standardize documentation/testing; establish performant data manipulation patterns (e.g., PySpark, SQL/Postgres) that speed iteration.
Key Requirements
- Python
- Pytorch or Tensorflow
- Data engineering: PySpark, SQL, Postgres, query tuning, data modeling
- Cloud data platforms (e.g., Databricks, S3/Snowflake/Azure/GCP)
- Nice to have experience in oncology/biotech/health tech

To Apply for this Job Click Here
Founding AI Engineer
San Francisco
$250000 - $300000
+ Data Science & AI
PermanentSan Francisco, California
To Apply for this Job Click Here
Founding AI Engineer
San Francisco, CA (Hybrid/On‑site preferred)
Founding Team * Full‑Time
$250,000-$300,000 salary + equity
About the Role
I’m looking for a hands‑on Founding AI Engineer to build and ship the core AI systems that will drive the product forward. Your work will center on fine‑tuning large language models, designing and owning training pipelines, and deploying models that perform reliably in real‑world production environments.
This role is ideal for someone who loves building: running experiments, writing code, optimizing models, and taking features from early prototype to fully deployed. You’ll work directly with me, help define our technical direction, and make an outsized impact from day one.
What You’ll Do
- Fine‑tune and adapt leading LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, Llama, Mistral, OSS) for production use cases.
- Build hands‑on data pipelines for SFT, DPO, LoRA, RL methods, and synthetic data generation.
- Design evaluation systems to measure accuracy, reliability, grounding, and hallucination reduction.
- Develop high‑performance inference infrastructure (quantization, batching, GPU optimization).
- Own the full lifecycle of ML features: modeling → pipelines → infra → deployment.
- Rapidly experiment, iterate, and improve model performance with tight feedback loops.
- Collaborate with me on architecture decisions and product direction.
What I’m Looking For
- Strong experience fine‑tuning and deploying LLMs in production.
- Deep ML engineering skills: Python, PyTorch, transformers, distributed/accelerated training.
- Comfort handling messy, real‑world data and building robust pipelines.
- Ability to move quickly, make informed tradeoffs, and deliver production-quality systems.
- A builder’s mindset-resourceful, execution‑driven, and energized by 0→1 challenges.
⭐ Bonus Points
- Experience with agentic systems, tool‑calling, or structured reasoning workflows.
- Background in MLOps, model evaluation frameworks, or GPU-aware engineering.
- Early‑stage startup or founding-team experience.
Why Join
- Founding-level equity with meaningful ownership.
- Massive responsibility and autonomy over the AI systems at the heart of the product.
- Freedom to experiment, move fast, and push the boundaries of what LLMs can do.
San Francisco, CA (Hybrid/On‑site preferred)
Founding Team * Full‑Time
$250,000-$300,000 salary + equity

To Apply for this Job Click Here
Lead AI Engineer
San Francisco
$250000 - $300000
+ Data Science & AI
PermanentSan Francisco, California
To Apply for this Job Click Here
Lead AI Engineer $250-300k + Equity – San Francisco Bay Area | Hybrid
Early-Stage Startup – Full-Time – AI Engineering
Join a fast-growing early‑stage startup building a next‑generation, AI‑native design‑to‑code platform. The team is creating a new category of design tooling where code renders directly as design, real-time AI is deeply embedded into the workflow, and designers work directly in the medium that ships to production.
We are now hiring a Lead AI Engineer as the first dedicated AI specialist on the team-owning the model layer, driving fine‑tuning strategy, and building custom SLMs that power a highly interactive, high‑performance product.
The Role
As the Lead AI Engineer, you’ll take end‑to‑end ownership of model development, optimization, deployment, and evaluation. This is a hands-on, production-focused role where you will build and maintain the AI systems at the core of the product experience.
You’ll work at the intersection of models, systems, and product-shipping production-grade AI features, shaping technical direction, and establishing best practices for evaluation and performance.
What You’ll Do
Model Fine‑Tuning & Specialization
- Lead fine‑tuning efforts across LoRA, adapters, distillation, and full fine‑tuning
- Decide when fine‑tuning, prompting, or system‑level approaches are most appropriate
- Iterate models based on real product signals and user feedback
- Balance quality, latency, reliability, and cost
Model Optimization & Performance
- Optimize inference speed, throughput, and per‑request cost
- Improve model determinism, consistency, and real-time responsiveness
- Define and maintain benchmarking, evaluation, and observability frameworks
Custom SLM Development
- Build small, fast language models tailored for design and code-generation workflows
- Identify use cases where SLMs outperform larger models
- Maintain and evolve SLMs in production environments
What You’ll Build
- Fine‑tuned models for design-to-code generation
- Custom SLMs for narrow, high‑precision workflows
- Real-time, streaming AI features inside a design environment
- Multi-step agentic systems supporting “prompt-as-cursor” and next‑in‑flow interactions
How You’ll Work
- ~80% hands‑on coding, 20% systems-level strategy
- Full lifecycle ownership: scoping → experimentation → deployment → monitoring → iteration
- Close collaboration with engineering and product leadership
- Operate within a highly senior, fast-moving engineering team
- Ideal for builders coming from AI‑native, high‑velocity environments
What We’re Looking For
Must-Have Experience
- 5+ years software engineering
- 2+ years hands‑on work with LLMs in production
- Proven fine‑tuning experience (LoRA, distillation, adapters, full fine‑tuning)
- Strong Python and TypeScript/Node.js skills
- Experience deploying custom models end‑to‑end
- Understanding of inference optimization and performance tradeoffs
- Experience with model evaluation and benchmarking
Nice-to-Haves
- ONNX Runtime
- Redis
- WebSockets
- LangChain or similar orchestration tools
- Model optimization and compression techniques
- LLM observability tooling
Ideal Background
- Experience in AI-native product startups (Seed → Series B/C)
- Work in code generation, developer tools, design tooling, or AI automation
- Strong applied experience shipping models to production at speed
How to Apply
If this role aligns with your experience and interests, please reach out with your Resume or LinkedIn profile. I would welcome a confidential conversation to explore whether it’s the right fit.
Lead AI Engineer $250-300k + Equity – San Francisco Bay Area | Hybrid
Early-Stage Startup – Full-Time – AI Engineering

To Apply for this Job Click Here
Lead AI Engineer
San Francisco
$250000 - $300000
+ Data Science & AI
PermanentSan Francisco, California
To Apply for this Job Click Here
Lead AI Engineer
Location: San Francisco Bay Area | Hybrid
Salary: $250-300k + Equity
Join a well-funded, AI-native startup at the forefront of redefining how digital products are designed and shipped.
This team is building a next-generation design platform where every screen is real, production-ready code. Designers work directly in the medium that ships, not static mockups, with AI deeply embedded into the workflow to accelerate iteration while preserving precision, consistency, and control.
Backed by top-tier Bay Area investors and senior product leaders from companies including Shopify, Notion, Dropbox, Stripe, and OpenAI, the company has strong runway, a high bar for talent, and ambitious plans ahead.
They’re now hiring their first dedicated Lead AI Engineer to own the model layer and drive AI performance across the product.
The Opportunity
You’ll work directly with the CTO and founding team to define and execute the AI strategy at the model level.
This is a hands-on, production-focused AI engineering role centered on:
- Fine-tuning LLMs for real-world use cases
- Optimizing inference speed, cost, and reliability
- Designing and deploying custom Small Language Models (SLMs)
- Establishing evaluation, benchmarking, and observability standards
What You’ll Be Responsible For
Fine-Tuning & Model Strategy
- Own fine-tuning workflows (LoRA, adapters, distillation, full fine-tuning)
- Decide when to fine-tune vs optimize at the system or prompt level
- Iterate models based on production feedback
- Balance quality, latency, and cost tradeoffs
Model Optimization & Performance
- Improve inference speed and throughput
- Reduce cost per request
- Enhance reliability and output consistency
- Define model evaluation and benchmarking frameworks
Custom SLM Development
- Design and train custom SLMs for specific design-to-code workflows
- Identify when smaller models outperform larger ones
- Deploy and maintain real-time, streaming AI systems
- Support multi-step and agentic AI capabilities within the product
What They’re Looking For
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- 2+ years building with LLMs in production environments
- Proven hands-on fine-tuning experience (LoRA, distillation, adapters, etc.)
- Experience deploying custom or specialized models
- Strong intuition around inference tradeoffs: latency, throughput, cost, reliability
- Proficiency in Python and TypeScript / Node.js
Nice to have:
- ONNX runtime or model optimization tooling
- Experience with orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain)
- WebSockets, Redis, or real-time streaming systems
- Background in AI-native or code-generation products
- A PhD or advanced degree is welcomed, but demonstrated production impact is the priority.

To Apply for this Job Click Here
We are the global leaders in Data & AI Recruitment
With over 15 years of experience working solely in the Data & AI sector, our San Francisco-focussed consultants are able to offer detailed insights and support into the industry.
Industry Hub
HARNHAM
News & Blog
With over 10 years experience working solely in the Data & AI sector our consultants are able to offer detailed insights into the industry.
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