Staff Applied AI Engineer

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San Francisco / $200000 - $300000 annum

INFO

Salary

SALARY:

$200000 - $300000

Location

LOCATION

San Francisco

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

Staff Applied AI Engineer | Bay Area (Hybrid) | $200k-$298k base + equity

I'm partnering with a high-growth SaaS company at the cutting edge of AI and compliance on a senior Applied AI Engineer hire.

This is not a typical "build a model and ship it" role.

This is where you define what good AI looks like - owning how systems retrieve, reason, and deliver trustworthy outputs at scale.

You'll sit at the intersection of research and real-world impact, shaping the intelligence behind core product features.

' :

* Improving RAG systems - retrieval quality, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search

* Designing evaluation frameworks (metrics, golden datasets, regression detection)

* Building and tuning ranking + reranking systems (cross-encoders, LLM rerankers)

* Running experiments to validate what actually improves performance

* Debugging failure modes across retrieval, reasoning, and generation

* Prototyping agent-style workflows over complex, document-heavy data

* Exploring ML approaches beyond GenAI (ranking, classification, probabilistic models)

' :

* 8-10+ years in applied ML, data science, or AI research

* Strong experience in information retrieval / search relevance

* Hands-on with RAG systems and retrieval optimization

* Deep understanding of evaluation + experimentation (A/B testing, metrics)

* Python + strong problem-solving / research mindset

* Someone who can explain why systems work (or don't) - not just build them

:

* You've only used LLM APIs without optimizing retrieval or evaluation

* Your experience is purely prompt engineering

* You prefer purely academic research without product impact

* You're looking for a heavily structured, slow-moving environment

Candidates must be based in the Bay Area and open to a hybrid setup.

If you're interested in making AI systems measurably better - not just building them, drop me a message or comment below.

Happy to share more details confidentially.

#AIJobs #MachineLearning #RAG #SearchRelevance #LLMs #Hiring #BayAreaJobs #TechJobs

CONTACT

Daniel Stockwell

Sourcing Consultant

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