Applied AI Engineer - Austin, TX

Location:
Austin, TX (Hybrid – 3 days in office)

Software engineering is changing fast.

AI tools can already help with small tasks. But the real opportunity isnt in isolated prompts — its in redesigning how mission-critical systems are built, maintained, and scaled using AI as a first-class engineering capability.

Were looking for an exceptional Applied AI Engineer to help answer a fundamental question:

What does it look like for a high-performance engineering team building institutional-grade financial software to use AI to its full potential — without compromising quality, security, or reliability?

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will ship production code while simultaneously embedding AI deeply into how we operate.

You will:

Build AI-powered engineering workflows that meaningfully accelerate delivery without sacrificing reliability or correctness.

Design and deploy agent-based systems, orchestration layers, and AI-assisted tooling that operate in real production environments.

Contribute directly to core product code
, using AI to amplify your own impact and prove out the workflows you introduce.

Systematize AI usage across the team
, turning ad hoc experimentation into consistent, high-quality processes with guardrails and observability.

Prototype AI-enabled product features
, partnering closely with product and engineering.

Continuously evaluate emerging models and tools
, exercising strong judgment about what to adopt and what to ignore.

Engineer AI infrastructure as a production system
, including CI/CD integration, configuration management, and safe rollout strategies.

You wont be leading a team of people (yet).
Youll be leading a team of AI agents.

Youre a strong engineer first.

Youve already shipped and owned meaningful production systems. You think in architectures, trade-offs, and failure modes — not just features. System design comes naturally to you.

Youre deeply excited about how AI is reshaping software engineering. Not casually interested — genuinely obsessed. You experiment constantly. Youve likely built your own agents, internal tooling, or AI-powered workflows simply because you couldnt resist.

You:

Code daily and enjoy it.

Have strong production instincts and know what good looks like.

Care about code quality, correctness, and reliability.

Take pride in unblocking others and increasing team leverage.

Think about optimization, efficiency, and long-term engineering velocity.

Are comfortable operating in ambiguity and turning emerging ideas into production-ready systems.

Treat AI infrastructure like any other critical backend system — versioned, observable, reproducible, and safe.

You likely have open-source contributions, side projects, or public experiments demonstrating how you use AI in real engineering environments.

You dont just use AI tools.
You engineer workflows around them.

You're primarily interested in AI research or training new foundation models. This is about applying existing models to real engineering systems.

You prefer advisory or short-term strategy work. We are looking for someone embedded deeply with the team who owns outcomes over time.

You enjoy automation disconnected from real production constraints. Everything here touches real code and real systems.

You're looking to manage a team. This is an individual contributor role focused on hands-on building.

You need fully remote work. This role is highly collaborative and based in Austin (3 days per week in office).