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 $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

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