Founding AI Engineer

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San Francisco / $250000 - $300000 annum

INFO

Salary
SALARY:

$250000 - $300000

Location

LOCATION

San Francisco

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

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

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