Lead AI Engineer

Hybrid – 3 days onsite

An early-stage, AI-native product company is hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own the model layer of its core product. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on fine-tuning, model optimization, and custom small model development — not prompt engineering or research-only experimentation. This engineer will be responsible for designing, shipping, and iterating on production-grade LLM systems with real-time user impact.

• Own fine-tuning strategy (LoRA, adapters, distillation, full fine-tuning)
• Decide when to fine-tune vs. use system-level or prompt-based approaches
• Improve models based on production feedback
• Balance quality, latency, and cost

• Optimize inference speed and throughput
• Improve reliability and consistency
• Define evaluation frameworks and benchmarking standards

• Design and deploy custom small language models (SLMs)
• Determine when smaller models outperform larger ones
• Maintain real-time performance for interactive UX workflows

• Fine-tuned models powering generation workflows
• Custom SLMs for narrow, high-precision tasks
• Real-time AI features embedded directly into product workflows
• Multi-step AI systems supporting contextual user interactions

• 5+ years software engineering experience
• 2+ years working hands-on with LLMs in production
• Proven experience fine-tuning and deploying models to real users
• Strong applied production track record (not research-only)
• Python, Type Script / Node.js
• Experience deploying custom models to production
• Deep understanding of inference and performance tradeoffs

• Web Sockets
• Redis
• ONNX Runtime
• LLM evaluation & observability tooling
• Orchestration frameworks (e.g., Lang Chain)
• Early-stage AI product companies (Seed – Series B/C)
• AI developer tools, automation, or code-generation platforms
• Fast-paced startup environments

* Please note - this role can not provide sponsorship of any kind. All candidates must be Green Card Holders or US Citizens.*