Lead 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

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.

CONTACT

Joshua Poore

Associate Director

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