Applied AI Engineer

Jito Labs

19h•$175,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

Jito is seeking the first dedicated AI engineer to capture uncaptured output gains across the company. This role has a company-wide mandate from day one to identify and solve high-leverage problems, particularly in workflows that are currently expensive, unowned, or handled as side tasks. The engineer will work with the CEO and teams across the company, including Operations, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Business Development, to find and implement solutions. The approach will be to buy and configure off-the-shelf solutions where possible, and build custom solutions when necessary. All shipped work will have a named maintainer and clear sunset criteria. A significant part of the role involves deeply understanding team workflows to identify optimization opportunities. The engineer will be responsible for the entire lifecycle of applications built on top of the platform layer, in partnership with the Security team from the design phase onwards. This is a mid-to-senior individual contributor role, focusing on applying AI to business problems rather than research or model training.

Requirements

Three to five years of experience shipping and operating production services.
Ability to stand up VM sandboxes, MCP servers, and vendor LLM integrations.
Experience shipping LLM and agent tooling that is actively used.
Buy-first instincts with the ability to build custom solutions when necessary.
Ability to extract real workflows from non-technical teams (Legal, Finance, Marketing) and ship usable tools.
Judgment to identify teams that are struggling and avoid pushing tools on those who haven't requested them.
Security-conscious design by reflex.
Operator mindset: ability to distinguish between the most interesting and highest-impact problems.
Self-directed prioritization skills.
Operational ownership: maintain shipped solutions and define sunset criteria.
Interest in scaling the output of 40 people to that of 400.

Nice To Haves

Experience with OpenHands, Langchain, or other coding agent frameworks deployed and maintained in a real environment.
Experience building and operating MCP servers.
Experience with CLI tooling and automation adopted by other engineers.
Experience in security and network operations (identity, secrets management, egress control, sandboxing).
Experience connecting existing systems and recognizing when to build custom solutions.
Experience as the only person in your function at a company under 50 people.
Experience owning a vendor surface (spend, data exposure, renewals).
Experience with Rust, Python, TypeScript, or a systems background.
Linux systems and DevOps experience.
Crypto or Solana literacy.

Responsibilities

Identify and solve high-leverage problems across the company using AI.
Work with the CEO and various teams (Ops, Legal, Finance, Marketing, BD) to understand and improve their workflows.
Determine when to buy and configure existing solutions versus building custom ones.
Build, secure, roll out, and maintain AI-powered applications.
Partner with the Security team on application design and implementation.
Understand team workflows in depth to identify optimization opportunities.
Own the applications built on top of the platform layer.
Prioritize use cases, estimate impact, and rank them with the CEO.
Maintain shipped applications and define clear kill criteria for projects.
Drive significant technical decisions and shape the company roadmap.