AI Engineer

career•Mountain View, CA

1d•$150,000 - $190,000

About The Position

AI Fund is a venture studio founded in 2017 by Dr. Andrew Ng, focused on building AI companies that move humanity forward. Our portfolio companies leverage AI technology across various industry sectors. The AI Fund team comprises AI pioneers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investors, and operators, backed by a substantial fund from leading global corporations and VC firms.

Requirements

3+ years of software engineering experience, including end-to-end ownership of at least one production AI application architecture spanning UI, backend, data, models, tools, and evaluation.
Demonstrated experience building applications that use large language models, multimodal models, or other modern AI capabilities in product workflows.
Strong technical fluency across frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and cloud deployment, with sufficient depth to review, debug, and steer implementation.
Expert ability to work with frontier coding agents, including writing precise specs, decomposing work, inspecting generated code, identifying architectural mistakes, and deciding when to intervene directly.
Ability to justify retrieval choices against corpus structure, freshness, permissions, latency, precision, recall, and cost.
Experience with SQL and NoSQL data systems, including the ability to model data for application use, retrieval, analytics, and operational reliability.
Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across disciplines.
Habit of reading papers, model cards, technical postmortems, and production writeups, then folding useful lessons into the next build.

Nice To Haves

Experience shipping MVPs, prototypes, or early-stage products under ambiguity.
Experience as a technical lead, architect, founding engineer, or senior builder on AI-driven products.
Contributions to open-source AI, developer tools, evals, retrieval, agents, or applied ML infrastructure.
Interest or experience in product design, product strategy, or company creation.

Responsibilities

Build full-stack AI prototypes to pressure-test venture ideas before founder or entrepreneur-in-residence handoff.
Design AI systems using composable building blocks, making tradeoffs visible to product and engineering partners.
Choose appropriate retrieval and context strategies based on data and task, including structured queries, hybrid search, reranking, graph traversal, and long-context or human-curated context.
Build agentic and workflow-based systems with clear control flow, bounded autonomy, useful tool interfaces, state management, recovery paths, and human review where appropriate.
Make architecture and platform choices suitable for the idea's stage, ensuring prototypes are easy to modify while maintaining a credible path to production if the idea validates.
Build and integrate APIs, databases, third-party services, internal tools, and cloud infrastructure.
Define evaluation loops for AI behavior, covering task success, retrieval quality, factuality, tool-call correctness, grounding, safety, latency, cost, and user-perceived quality.
Utilize error analysis to determine improvements for prompts, data, retrieval, tools, orchestration, model choice, UX, or product scope.
Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and AI experts to create, test, and iterate on new concepts using direct user feedback.
Present build results to potential entrepreneurs-in-residence and founders, detailing successes, failures, and key information for decision-making.
Direct frontier coding agents to translate product and technical intent into working software, overseeing architecture, review, debugging, and quality.
Identify and troubleshoot issues across the full stack, including frontend, backend, AI orchestration, data pipelines, deployment, and production behavior.
Contribute to improving development processes, reusable engineering practices, and shared technical judgment within the team.