Applied AI Engineer

MLabs • San Francisco, CA

3h • Remote

About The Position

We aren't building another chatbot or a simple copilot; we are building the future of the digital workforce. Our mission is to create autonomous AI employees that function as full-fledged teammates. Our first "Artisan," Ava, is an AI Business Development Representative (BDR) currently supporting hundreds of companies. She doesn't just assist with tasks—she researches leads, crafts emails in a customer's unique voice, manages her own deliverability infrastructure, and handles meeting bookings autonomously.
The Role:
As our third Applied AI Engineer, you will join a high-growth, YC-backed team (currently at $8M+ ARR) to build the next generation of AI workers. You will tackle massive engineering challenges as we develop "Ava 2.0," a step-change in autonomous capability. Reporting directly to the CPTO, you will have a direct hand in product direction and the architectural backbone of our agents.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience shipping production-grade AI products, either at an app-layer startup or on a foundation model team.
• Technical Depth: Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (e.g., LangChain, ReAct, OpenAI Tools).
• Prompt Engineering: Strong background in prompt design, chaining, and retrieval systems.
• Operational Excellence: Proven ability to own the latency, reliability, and cost of LLM-powered systems in a live environment.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with a penchant for directness and candor.
• Location: Based in San Francisco, New York, or Remote (USA).
• Founder Mindset: We empower you to take initiative, challenge ideas, and push for 10x outcomes.
• Impact-Driven: We focus on the 80/20 rule—killing sunk costs quickly and focusing on what moves the needle for our customers.
• High Standards: We care about the details, from the elegance of the code to the quality of the product copy.
• No Drama: We maintain a "winning team energy"—low ego, high positive vibes, and a genuine love for building.
• Growth: Work at a fast-scaling startup ($35M+ raised) with a clear path to market leadership in the AI worker space.

Responsibilities

• Model Strategy: Evaluate and select LLMs, balancing the trade-offs between cost, latency, reliability, and accuracy for specific tasks.
• Agent Architecture: Design prompt frameworks and agent behaviors for complex workflows including email generation, web research, and CRM integration.
• Workflow Optimization: Build and refine multi-step agent chains using RAG, web search, and tool-use (calendars, APIs, etc.).
• Infrastructure & Safety: Drive choices for orchestration, persistent memory, and "eval loops" while building the guardrails that ensure AI safety and trust.
• Future Modalities: Explore and deploy emerging tech, from voice AI to multi-modal reasoning, to make our Artisans feel truly human-like.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed